Transcript for Better content, made easy: using the accessibility inspector in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel

Introduction

Matthew Deeprose: Thank you, Julia. Hello everyone, welcome to "better content, made easy", where we will introduce you to the accessibility inspector in Office.

What if I told you there is a way to make your documents presentations and spreadsheets more professional, improve your efficiency in blackboard, make the world a better place for all, and that was easy? Sounds pretty amazing, right?

Today we're going to introduce you to the accessibility inspector in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

The accessibility inspector

identifies possible improvements you can make to the accessibility of your document,
runs whilst you're working,
and it will show you how to make your document more accessible

Accessibility is about removing barriers that might prevent colleagues, students, or the general public from getting the most out of our resources, particularly if they have an impairment or disability. Accessible content is just better content.

If you use Blackboard, you're probably used to seeing these accessibility indicators. These give you instant feedback on the accessibility of the content that you upload for your students. But the accessibility inspector in Office can take you further. It points out these issues whilst you create content. So, it's more efficient to resolve these issues before you upload the content to Blackboard.

As a professional you want your audience to focus on your content, and when content shows poor accessibility practice it can make it more frustrating. For example, when text has too little contrast you might be distracted trying to make out what's on screen and lose focus. Or if you open up a large document and you find you can't navigate for it using headings and you're in a rush, it's likely you'll be distracted by the problems the content is causing you, not the solutions you're expecting to find in that content.

Even if your audience knows nothing about accessibility, if you follow good accessibility practice it's more likely that you'll get the results you want. While we usually don't notice when something's good, we do notice when something isn't that good.

So where is the accessibility inspector and how does it work?

It appears as a button in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel at the bottom left centre of the screen. This is the Office programs; we'll talk about if you use Office in a web browser in a moment. It will either say "accessibility: investigate" or "accessibility: good to go". You select the button to open it. Having selected the button a panel appears on the right of the screen that lists any accessibility issues the inspector has found. In this case it's missing alternative text.

You might remember we covered writing alternative text in a session back in May and the link to that session, by the way, is in the slide deck.

So, in the screenshot now we have selected that error. The inspector is giving us some choices, and links to learn more. In this example, I've selected "add a description". Now, I can enter my alternative text. So, by alerting us to issues whilst we create a document, it makes it easy for us to resolve those issues right here and now.

Once we've resolved all the issues that the inspector has identified, the button changes to "accessibility: good to go", so this means that we've resolved all of the issues that the inspector has identified. It doesn't mean our document is perfect, it just means we've resolved the issues that the computer was able to detect automatically. We'll be covering some issues that the inspector can't find in this session and in future sessions.

If you're using a pc that is managed by the university the accessibility inspector should appear while you work, but it's possible that this isn't the case, or you might be using a personal or other non-university PC. so how do you turn this feature on?

In Windows, you would open up Word, PowerPoint, or Excel go to the file menu, select options and from the ease of access section select " keep accessibility checker running while I work". You need to do this in each of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

If you're using a Mac, open one of PowerPoint, Word, or Excel and open "preferences". Choose "ease of access", and under "accessibility checker" select "keep accessibility checker running while I work".

So far we've talked about using the Office programs on your computer, but you can also use Office in a web browser. There isn't an accessibility inspector in browser-based Office, but you can check for accessibility issues. Open the review tab, select "check accessibility". Any accessibility issues it can detect will be shown on the right and the view is filtered by issue and priority. So, use the buttons to change the filters to view all of the identified issues in the document. Select an issue to find out how to resolve it.

So, in today's session, we're going to look at using the accessibility inspector in Word. PowerPoint, and Excel.

The inspector can spot 16 different types of issues but we're just going to look at six today. We're going to start by diving into Word. Let's dip into the demonstration.

Worked example: Word

Here I have a word file. It's a document I threw together about superheroes. Down at the bottom here, I've got the accessibility inspector button that says "accessibility: investigate". So, I'm going to select that button and it opens up on the right. It's found two issues. Something to do with headings in both cases.

Headings

I'm going to look at this one first: no headings in document. I'm going to select this title of the issue and then I've got… oh, it's in this document. What does that mean? So, then I can select that it says, "review document navigation". So that's brought up the navigation pane, and by the way you can also open this up - the navigation pane - by going to View and making sure that "navigation pane" is ticked. Probably, some of you will be used to using this and if you aren't it's a really useful feature, it should list all of the headings in the document so you can skip through and find something, which is really useful for longer documents.

You might be thinking, "Matt, I can see the headings they're there, look! History of Superheroes, 1900s, 1939… 1940s. So, it's broken right?" Now, I've only made these look like headings by making the text larger and in a bold font. So, you see I've got font size 20 and bold but I haven't actually told the computer that these are headings, I've just used these graphical elements to make it look like a heading - the computer doesn't know. That can be really important.

For example, a screen reader is a piece of assistive technology that reads out what's on screen. Many of those who use screen readers will navigate a page in a different way than you might be used to. One such method is to navigate through the headings of a document or page. On screen are two documents. The NVDA screen reader has been set up to show the headings in the document. While the documents look the same, only one shows headings to navigate. This is because only one document has headings set up using heading styles. The other simply uses bold text and a large font to visually show headings. A screen reader user can navigate quickly through the document with headings to find out to find the content they want, but they have to listen through the whole document to find what they're interested in within the document if they don't have headings.

So how do we actually add these headings? Well, it's quite straightforward. We could select our first heading, and I can use the styles up here in word and say this is my first heading, heading level one - the top heading. Then this is my next subheading, I make that a heading two. You can see already the error has disappeared from the accessibility inspector and I'm building up this hierarchy. Now, just to not make you watch me do the whole of this document, here's one that I prepared earlier. If I go to the view menu and open the navigation pane you can see I've got all the headings. I can very quickly move through this document, and I've also got subheadings even below that.

Now, when we're adding our headings it's important that we don't skip a level. Here's a graphic example from the Big Hack which is a website set up by the charity Scope. Here, they demonstrate that we have a heading one and… it's a bit like folders and subfolders, we've got heading two and then another heading two then below that heading three. What's really important is that we don't go from say a heading two straight to heading five. We have to make sure that we follow that sequence. You might think, "but Matt, there I could see it goes from a heading four to heading two." That's okay because that's within the hierarchical structure: I've gone to a certain sub-topic - my heading four and now next is a kind of sub-heading from heading one. So, I've got that set up there.

I know some of you are likely to say, "I don't like these headings and how they look - why is it blue? I don't want blue!" It's very easy to change these. So, say I actually want my heading two to look different? I can right click on heading two. It's helpful to put the cursor where you've got a heading two otherwise it might skip to where you've left the cursor. I can right click on that heading two and choose modify. There, I can change the font size, bold, italic, or underline, and change the colour. Maybe I want to adjust the colour and perhaps I want to increase the font by one point. Select ok and now all of the heading twos in this document now have the style that I wanted.

Another great use for headings is if you've got a long document that you want to make a table of contents [for] you can make that table of contents automatically once you've got the headings set up. So that can be really super useful.

Table headers

Let's look at the other issue that I had with that document. I have a table here that says, "no header row". Again, you might say, "I can see the header row, look it's there at the top!" But once again I've made this heading look like a heading, but I haven't told the computer it's a heading. Now why might that be important? I'm going to play you a short a couple of clips. I mentioned in our last session on alt text about Blackboard and how students and staff can create alternative versions of documents and one of those alternative versions is an audio version. This really suits you if you prefer to listen to content, perhaps you do a lot of commuting and you want to make use of that time, or it might be that you really rely on having an audio version because of a visual impairment.

Let's listen to how this table sounds once we've got Blackboard to create an audio version when we haven't added the headings. So, this will take about 30 seconds.

Computer: Begin table with three columns and three rows. Row one of three. Column one of three. Superhero. Column two of three. Skill. Column three of three. Nemesis.

Row two of three, column one of three. Batman. Column two of three. Crime solving. Column three of three. The Joker.

Row three of three. Column one of three. Superman. Column two of three. Flying. Column three of three. Lex Luthor.

Matthew Deeprose: So, you may or may not have spotted that as we went through the document and we were listening to it, it was just telling us the content of each cell and its place within the table like the column and the row. Imagine if this was a much more complex table, perhaps a table with lots of numbers and when we're at row three of three, column three of three, it just told us "Lex Luthor". If this was actually row 10 of 15 and column 5 of 10 we might have forgotten, what was column 3 about?

So, let's see what that sounds like, or hear what that sounds like, when we fix the heading.

Computer: Begin table with three columns and three rows. Row one of three. Column one of three. Column heading Superhero. Column two of three. Column heading Skill. Column three of three. Column heading Nemesis.

Row two of three. Column one of three with column heading Superhero, Batman. Column two of three with column heading Skill, Crime solving. Column three of three with column heading Nemesis, The Joker.

Row three of three. Column one of three with column heading superhero, Superman. Column two of three with column heading skill, Flying. Column three of three with column heading Nemesis, Lex Luthor.

Matthew Deeprose: Hopefully, you would have noticed there it was saying for each cell once we got into the kind of the data rows, it was reminding us what the column heading was so when it said, "row three of three, column two of three with column heading skill, flying", there we know that flying was the skill. Again, this is a very simple table just for demonstration purposes, but if we had a larger table then being reminded what those headings were will be really important.

It's hard enough listening to a large data table with the column headings because there's a lot to listen to and to keep track of in your mind, but if you don't… if you're not being reminded of those column headings then it can be really tough. So, how do we fix that?

Again, I can select the issue, it's saying it's an issue with the table. I can click on the button and yeah… "use first row as header". Sounds good, I like that! Now the issue's gone there's actually one more thing that we need to do. We're going to right click on that and choose properties. Go to the row tab and we're going to untick "allow row to break across pages" and tick "repeat as header row at the top of each page". This has many benefits but particularly if you had a printout and a table was going across multiple pages then it will repeat the header row so you don't have to keep referring back to what were these columns about, and also selecting these options is the key to making sure you get the best result in the Blackboard audio version.

Word: conclusion and question break

Now I'm going to go back to our slide deck at which I am at now at. I went through that quite quickly about which buttons to tick here. So, you've got that back in the slides. We've also got some helpful links which can tell you more about headings and table styles. We could take a break for questions, so I'll hand over to Julia to go through anything that was in the chat.

Julia Reardon: No actual questions, Matt. Just an observation from Wendy-Anne which says you have to have a super memory if you're visually impaired. I'll say yes, which is why we put headers there. Just so that we help them out because my memory would have forgotten by the time I got down to the fourth cell there.

Matthew Deeprose: Definitely!

Julia Reardon: I don't know whether there are any other questions on Word.

Matthew Deeprose: I see that Christine asked, doing the audio version, does it read the table and say "superhero" is "superman", "skill" was "flying" rather than referencing the cell number?

Shall we listen to it again?

Row two of three. Column one of three with column heading Superhero…

Matthew Deeprose: Hopefully, you could see, or hear, that it was referring to the numbers of the columns and the rows as well as giving that extra heading information. Does that answer your question, Christine?

Christine Telfer: Yes, it does thank you.

Matthew Deeprose: Awesome! Does anyone else have any questions? Otherwise, we will move on and talk about PowerPoint. Okay so let's have a look. We're going to do a demonstration and I'm going to bring up a sample PowerPoint file.

Worked example: PowerPoint

So, this is a PowerPoint file I just knocked up, it's about making a cup of tea. Maybe you've got a cup of tea right now? I've got a title; I've got some pictures like a sequence of what I might do if I was going to make a cup of tea. Now everyone has their own rituals of course but usually you might put the tea in the tea bag, get the kettle, get some water in it, boil the kettle, add the water, add the milk, and then drink your tea. It looks pretty simple right? Can't be much wrong with that?

Colour contrast

I'm going to select the accessibility inspector and I've got two issues to look at. Let's have a look here. First of all, it's saying there's some "hard to read text contrast", and it's in the title which is up here, "Let's make a cup of tea". What do we mean by contrast? I going to go back to our main slide deck to explain that.

Using sufficient contrast is important for many reasons and you're likely to have encountered situational impairments like trying to use a screen in a bright light, or projector screen in a poorly lit room, or screen glare that makes it harder to see what's on screen, or you're just working in a room with poor lighting. When we have text or images with insufficient or low contrast those situational impairments can make it even worse. I particularly remember sitting in a lecture theatre looking at a really important all-staff presentation with a projector quality a bit like this and the text was yellow text with a white background, and you just couldn't make out anything. Our ability to distinguish contrast also reduces as we age and good contrast can also help those who are colourblind, have low vision, or other visual impairments.

We're going to cover this in much more detail in a future session but I'm just going to give you a quick deep dive into colour contrast. I'm sharing nine boxes in rows of three. Each box has a different coloured background and white or black text. The top row is harder to read because the colour of the text has low contrast to the background colour. The bottom row is easier to read. The text has higher contrast with the background colour. What about that middle row? Some might find it easy to read some might disagree. How do we know how much contrast is sufficient? The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which you might hear us shortening to WCAG, provide a calculation for assessing colour contrast the result is a number, or a ratio with a number, and the higher the number the better.

I've revealed the contrast ratios for these boxes. The top row are all low numbers they're below 2:1 those would actually all fail. The bottom row are high numbers they're all over 7:1. Those would all pass, they go well beyond the minimum level of contrast. That middle row where some might say it's all right for me, and some might say it's not so good for me, those would actually all fail because we need to have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 to make sure that we're meeting best practice in accessibility.

Again, we're going to do this in a future session but just in case you're interested… Just for images or graphical objects or user interface elements like this arrow here or this filled circle here, we need to have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1 from the colour of the image to the background colour. For text we have a minimum of a 4.5 to 1 contrast ratio and there's also an enhanced level of 7:1. You can look these up online you don't have to get a pen and paper out. You can just put in two colour codes and get a result my favourite site to do this is whocanuse.com.

The accessibility inspector won't identify all contrast issues. It doesn't work on images [of text] like this flyer for a summer party. I could tell you anything that involves yellow and white is not going to be good for contrast! It also won't detect contrast in shapes, all of these shapes have fill colours that don't have sufficient contrast. If like me you like using design ideas you want to watch out because sometimes PowerPoint, depending on the template, will suggest colours which are not accessible and it won't tell you that they're not accessible either, which is a bug I've reported to Microsoft.

Keeping it simple, the main thing to remember is that lighter text on a darker background will be easier to read and should have sufficient contrast, and likewise darker text on a lighter background should be easier to read. So, let's go back and look at how we're going to fix this issue.

So again, I'm going to select the issue here I can either change the font colour or the fill colour. So, the text colour or the background. So, knowing that darker text is better with a lighter colour background, I could change my text colour to black and you should see straight away that that issue is gone. Likewise, if I just do an undo, I could change the shape fill colour to a darker colour that will contrast well with white. Again, that's gone so you don't really need to worry specifically about contrast ratios, just remember light text should have a darker background, darker text should have a lighter background, but you can get into the minutia which we will do in a future session.

Reading order

Now I've got one more issue here, reading order. I'm going to play you again an audio clip demonstrating why reading order is important. So, let's explain the reading order. So again, I've uploaded this slide to Blackboard and made an audio version let's listen to what's happening with it.

Computer: Title: Let's make a cup of tea!

Begin heading level one.

Let's make a cup of tea.

Begin image with description, "boil the kettle".

Begin image with description, "Drink your lovely cup of tea."

Begin image with description, "put the tea bag into the mug".

Begin image with description, "pour water into the kettle".

Begin image with description, "pour boiling water from the kettle into the mug".

Begin image with description, "add a splash of milk to the mug".

Matthew Deeprose: If I were to follow those instructions, I wouldn't have a successful cup of tea, which is obviously a bit of a disaster. So how can we fix that issue? Let's take a look. So, if I go here I've got "check reading order slide one". I've got my recommended action, "verify object order". Of course, I can always learn more and I can find out information about this issue as well.

If you're like me, you probably build slides by ignoring the template and dropping in the images and word art and boxes and so on as you like. Ideally we should just use the templates because the template should have the reading order fixed, but often I might be just wanting to throw in some pictures, and I might change my mind about how I'm going to add the content onto the slide.

The reading order when you create a slide will be the order in which you added the images [and other content] to the slide. I appreciate this might be a little bit small to see, but I can see picture two (because I've added all of the alternative text because I thought I was going to be good) and it's saying boil the kettle. If I select that I can see well that's actually my third image in the sequence and I happen to know that I'm going first row and across, and then second row and across.

So, to fix the reading order I just need to move these items either by dragging and dropping, or using the up and down arrows, into the correct sequence. I find it quite useful, if I select what I know is the first image, I can then move that up because I've got the title first, then I'm going to put the tea bag into the mug. Then my next one is "pour water into the kettle"… I won't make you watch me do all of this but hopefully you get the idea. Let's see how that sounds when we fixed the issue.

Computer: Title: "Let's make a cup of tea!"

Begin heading level one: "Let's make a cup of tea!"

Begin image with description, "put the tea bag into the mug".

Begin image with description, "pour water into the kettle".

Begin image with description, "boil the kettle".

Begin image with description, "pour boiling water from the kettle into the mug".

Begin image with description, "add a splash of milk to the mug".

Begin image with description, "drink your lovely cup of tea".

Awesome! So that's resolved that issue.

PowerPoint: conclusion and question break

We've got lots of links to help you out if you want to learn more. If you're using our university brand then we've got a helpful colour matrix which will tell you which colours are accessible when you use them with each other, and if you're just looking for some ideas of some accessible colour combinations you could use, I've also got an accessible colour suggester, where you can click on a randomise button and get a selection of different background, text, and graphic colours, that you could use for your next infographic, or presentation.

Again, let's take a break and look for… I'll hand back to Julia to summarise any questions from the chat and do put up your hand if you have a question.

Julia Reardon: We have no questions at the moment. So, anybody out there who wants to ask a question just unmute and ask.

Matthew Deeprose: I'm now going to hand over to Luke who's going to show us Excel and accessibility inspector. I'm going to stop sharing and Luke's going to take over and do his part next.

Worked example: Excel

Luke Searle: So, I'm going to run through very quickly two very common issues that we've faced in Microsoft Excel. One of these issues is unique to Excel and the other one is found across all of the Microsoft Office applications but it's really useful to know how we can fix this in Excel.

Alternative text

So, the first issue I'm actually going to demonstrate is alternative text onto graphs. So, here on the screen I've opened an Excel file and I've got my graph on the screen. So, this is the same method that you use in all of the different Office applications. We can add alternative text to this graph. You can add alternative text to most non-text objects and there's two ways you can go about doing this.

You can right click and come down to the "edit alt text" and this will add alt text. It will open the alt text pane on the right hand side of your screen. Alternatively, like Matthew has shown, we can come to the accessibility inspector. So, if I come down to the bottom toolbar this will then open up a high level view of all of the accessibility issues contained within this file which is really useful. So, again I can then come over to the errors, I can select the missing alternative text error and it will tell me exactly which chart it is. So, it will tell me that this is chart one. If I'm ever not sure where I'm actually doing… where the alt text should be I can click on the chart and I will have the chart down here, which is really easy to find. They'll also tell me the sheet name as well so if you've got a workbook with lots of different sheets it should be easy to find your accessibility issues.

So, I can then click on this small drop down and I can add a description. Adding a description to charts is a bit of an art form but Matthew is really well summarised in a previous session how this can be done and basically it follows this format. If I close this down and then reopen the alternative text to this graph… so this graph has been remediated, it's got the title of the graph followed by all of the data points throughout. So, I've got all of the scores across here and it follows it in a logical order. So, this makes it really useful for your audience to interact with this graph no matter if they have any impairments or barriers.

One thing that I'd like to make you aware of as well is using slices. We can use slices to filter graphs really quickly, [but it] doesn't actually change the alternative text. So, it's really important that when you're adding your alternative text to graphs in Excel to actually remove any filters you've got applied to your data set. So, this way, you're providing an alternative description to your whole data so you're not just providing it for a partial piece of data.

Exclusive use of colour

The next accessibility issue that I'm going to show you is the exclusive use of colour. So, here I've got the raw data in a table with some formatting applied onto this column. So, these are all applied as numbers. So again, if I come down to the bottom left hand corner to the accessibility inspector I can see that here I've got the exclusive use of colour. What this means is that colour is being used to format a change compared to the rest of the data. So, in this instance this 0.04 that I've highlighted on the screen is actually a negative number. This can be really troublesome if we rely on colour only to denote this. A really common practice is that people print out their workbooks and their worksheets and they'll print them in black and white so if I apply a colour filter you can see instantly how difficult it is to actually obtain that that is a negative number, and this is really common particularly in the workplace and in offices.

So, what we can do to make this a lot easier is we can add a minus sign to the prefix of this number. To do this we can either format the cell number in the accessibility inspector, or we can come up to the top toolbar and we can choose the correct option here. So again, it will highlight a sample and you can see here that we've added this minus prefix to the number. So, once I then press OK you can see that that has now been repaired.

This is something I've spoken to Microsoft with as well is the colour contrast that it selects for the red colour isn't actually accessible, so once you've done that and you've added your minus to it, I would also change the colour to a slightly darker red. This way it should be a lot easier for your audience to actually see that it's a different colour but typically I would avoid using red text because it can be problematic for those with varying degrees of colour blindness and vision.

So that was a quick demonstration of alternative text within graphs on Excel and red-only formatting for negative numbers, but it doesn't stop there!

Styles gallery

In Excel, similar to Microsoft Word, we have a styles gallery. Now, these styles galleries are very useful at formatting a combination of cells really quickly, and to make your spreadsheet look appealing. You can apply this by going to the home tab and then using the drop-down menu on the style section. It will provide all of these different sections over here, the good, bad, the neutral data model, and we've got our famous titles and headings. So, we can apply these to a range of different cells. However not all of these are accessible. These ones in particular are ones that I would strongly recommend you move away from. This is purely because the text has a very low [contrast] rating against the background so it can be difficult for people to read. As Matthew pointed out earlier, down here in accent four is that dreaded yellow background and white text which makes it very difficult even for people with good vision to interpret.

Conditional formatting

Conditional formatting is commonly used in Microsoft Excel and the good news is that all of these are accessible although the yellow fill on a dark yellow background is only just above that 4.5:1 ratio that Matthew mentioned earlier. So, what I would recommend is using the custom format so you can format your own conditional formatting to have better contrast with the text. It should also be noted that this is colour only formatting which can be problematic for those for those people who read and who don't see colour. We are going to explore in a future session how you can format your cells beyond going using colour only formatting.

Table styles

Matthew also showed us tables in Microsoft Word, and these are the table styles in Excel. The reason why I've highlighted all of these is because I've done the hard work for you, and I've worked out which tables are accessible. To do this I had a quick look at the colour combinations between the text and the header row and then the text and the table body and it works out around just shy of half of the table styles are accessible. A good rule of thumb to go with is using those dark colours and light backgrounds or vice versa.

Conclusion and question break

I've got a range of different links there. Also I'd strongly recommend the Excel bootcamp course on LinkedIn Learning that is very useful, and I think Matthew has put it in the chat already with his recording on how to write alt text for images, charts, and graphs and now I'll pass back to Julia to see if the audience has any questions.

Julia Reardon: Not so far Luke, nope, I think we hand back to Matt.

Matthew Deeprose: Thanks to Luke especially for volunteering to take care of the Excel part of this presentation. A very noble effort, thank you Luke.

PDF Accessibility tips

Now you might be asked to create a PDF. PDFs can be useful as a simple way to share content, but they can be a challenge to make accessible, so we have a few tips. First check whether PDF really is the right format. If your original file is Word, PowerPoint, or Excel, sharing the original file might be better - so that original format rather than using a PDF. That's especially the case if you're going to upload the file to Blackboard because students can create a tagged PDF alternative format if they happen to prefer to use a PDF and that's going to be better than you trying to make a good accessible PDF yourself.

If you're going to go ahead with a PDF make sure as much as possible that you followed that accessibility good practice in your original files. The accessibility inspector can help you with this as we've hopefully shared today. It's important to set the title of your document and we'll demonstrate this in a moment on the next slide. Finally use save as PDF, rather than print to PDF. When you save as PDF that resulting file keeps that accessibility information like headings and so on. If you print to PDF that information is lost, making the PDF much worse in terms of accessibility.

So how do you set a title for a file in Word, PowerPoint, or Excel? You go to this info menu, and then you enter the title according to your preference. Simple as that.

Conclusion and question break

Now we've reached our conclusion. Let's try to make this our new slogan: it's not good to go until the accessibility inspector says it's good to go. It might not be possible in all cases but let's make this our intention - so that we can be as accessible as possible, so that everyone can benefit.

We've also learned today that the accessibility inspector cannot tell you all accessibility issues but using it regularly will raise your awareness of what to look out for and consider as you continue on your accessibility journey.

In terms of next steps, try using the accessibility inspector and post your questions about it in the 365 community. We've added lots of links in the slide deck to help you. As you're using the inspector, give us feedback on what you would like us to cover in a future session so we can prepare a deeper dive into the topics that matter most to you.

Accessibility isn't only about making your content accessible for others, there are many accessibility tools and features that can make your life easier. For example, you can dictate documents and emails. You can use immersive reader to make content easier to read or have it read aloud to you. I use this feature often to help me to proofread documents. You could set your computer to use a light mode or dark mode depending on your preference or your environment, your lighting conditions. Usually everyone has a has a preference. Maybe some of you are like me? It's the first thing I change when I get a new device. You might have heard of blue light filters or night light settings. Now, some find that using these whatever the time of day can help to reduce eye strain. You can change the scale of how Windows presents content to make it larger if you wish.

So, we've got some links at the end here. There's an introductory course to digital accessibility on Blackboard which has recently been extended to include lots of guidance specifically about accessibility and Office. Microsoft has a brilliant short course on accessibility fundamentals. There's a really lovely short course on LinkedIn Learning called digital accessibility for the modern workplace it's less than an hour long and it's really approachable, I really recommend it. We mentioned that computers can't detect all accessibility issues, I strongly recommend the dyslexia friendly style guide from the British Dyslexia Association. There's lots of simple and easy tips there that will help you to make your content more accessible. Here's a screenshot from the introductory course on Blackboard, the course is broken into two main parts. One section explains accessibility from the perspective of the lived experience of those with different types of impairment, and the other is a dedicated section to Office accessibility. That's a great resource for dipping in and out of to remind yourself of things we've covered today and further ways that you can improve accessibility of the content you create in Office.

We've also got more links here for example Jon Lightfoot our colleague has a great SharePoint site about creating accessible PDFs. Also if you do use design ideas check out my blog post on some of the unhelpful ways design ideas might exclude your audience and how to resolve those issues.

If you're interested in having your emails read aloud to you or changing colours in windows and so on, I've got some links there. If you use something that isn't Windows, the My Computer My Way site has lots more along these lines. They cover Windows, Macs, iPhones, android phones, and Chromebooks. Julia has recently updated the 365 community SharePoint site to include a dedicated 365 accessibility hub where you can find out more about using the Microsoft 365 tools in an accessible way and much more.

Thank you for your participation and engagement in today's session. We can use our remaining time to answer your questions and discuss anything we've covered today or anything else you'd like to talk about. Thanks very much! Over to you, Julia.

Julia Reardon: We have a hand up as well from Christina Thompson. So, Christina do you want to unmute and ask your question?

Question: Writing alternative text for screenshots

Christina Thompson: Yeah, it was just a question going back to pictures I've had a little look. Quite often I'm writing working instructions for Business World and the Online Store and quite often imagery is very important. I'm just struggling with how to put a suitable text really on images that would make sense, because these are often screen shots and you know I'm a bit lost and happy to investigate a bit more really.

Matthew Deeprose: Yeah we can definitely help you with that! Let me… I'm just going to bring up a slide from another presentation. Hopefully, you can see I've got some this is from another presentation which is for iSolutions. So, really in a way you shouldn't need to worry about the alternative text for screenshots. The main point is don't use the screenshot as the only way of explaining something. That'll be easier [to explain] if I have this example. So, in this example I've got some text instructions saying tick the boxes as shown here and my alternative text is Blackboard discussion board options. Now, I could change my alternative text to say "allow members to create new threads" is ticked, "allow file attachments" is ticked but a better way would be to mark the image as decorative and make sure that the text is such that I could follow the instructions without the images, and the images are just a nice extra to have to help those who can see them. But if I didn't have the images I would still be able to follow the guidance. Now, it might not be that something is as straightforward in an application like Business World or something like that which I have very little knowledge of, but if you can find a way to write the text that is clear enough that you could follow the steps to achieve a process or something, without having to look at the picture, but still have the picture as an like an additional resource, that's what we tend to recommend. I don't know Christina if that is a very helpful answer for you?

Christina Thompson: Yeah that is very helpful! It's obviously… some images are quite complex but yeah, putting a menu down of what you're basically looking at could well help that it was just obviously that quite a lot of the time that inspectors come up with "investigate" and then I look at it and thinking, "oh god, what we're going to do about that one!" But yeah no that's very helpful thank you very much.

Matthew Deeprose: Brilliant! Glad we could help. Of course, if you do get any interesting or unusual examples that are particularly challenging then if you post them in the 365 community I'm sure that our community hive mind might be able to help to come up with some suggestions.

Christina Thompson: Yes, great, thank you.

Julia Reardon: I like that, "our community hive mind!" Right well thanks again to Matt and Luke. Just to say that next week we're back on the Wednesday, I think it is, and it's about working with Outlook folders.