From mcantino at nwresd.k12.or.us Thu Jun 1 14:53:14 2023 From: mcantino at nwresd.k12.or.us (Michael Cantino) Date: Thu Jun 1 14:53:27 2023 Subject: [Athen] My opinion on Bookshare In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I agree with everyone's thoughts on Bookshare so far. I agree that we should be encouraging publishers to create accessible materials, and we should be encouraging institutions to adopt accessible materials. That said, I'm not ready to let Bookshare off the hook. Bookshare knows that there are major issues with their BRF files, and from my perspective, their response to address these issues has been inadequate. A year ago, I sent Bookshare an extensive list of specific issues with their braille files. We sent a follow up email in December restating the issues, and I demonstrated how Bookshare has the files and information they need to automatically produce braille files with significantly better structure than they're currently providing. After that email, we had a meeting with Bookshare in January to dig deeper into these issues. Bookshare assured us that they would work on improving their braille output. Since then, we've heard virtually nothing from Bookshare, and we haven't received any information about potential improvements to their braille output. Yes, we need to encourage publishers and institutions to do better in terms of accessibility, but we also need to push Bookshare to do better. Readers who prefer braille but don't have access to a refreshable braille display need access to high quality BRFs to emboss. Providing braille files with zero formatting (or worse, truly awful formatting for things like tables and math expressions) is not equal access. Asking users to check out 3 or 4 editions of a title, in a non-preferred format, and then settling on the least-bad option is not equal access. We wouldn't expect sighted users to tolerate this kind of experience, but Bookshare has been offering this sub-standard experience to braille readers for years. Bookshare can and must do better, and I think it's past time that they buckle down and address these issues. Michael Cantino (he/him) BVIS Technology Professional Development Specialist Northwest Regional Education Service District -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From armstrongdeborah at fhda.edu Fri Jun 2 09:14:00 2023 From: armstrongdeborah at fhda.edu (Deborah Armstrong) Date: Fri Jun 2 09:14:07 2023 Subject: [Athen] Accessible Online Spanish Learning Platform In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Yes, Pearson's Mosaicos book is wonderfully marked up so that JAWS NVDA, and VoiceOver all properly read the textbook switching languages when appropriate. With JAWS you can choose between ten free Spanish voices as well, so you have some variety as you progress through the book. The McGraw-Hill connect platform, by contrast does not have a very accessible textbook. Though JAWS can read it, there's no markup. The Pearson platform by default has an image-only version of the book. To get to the accessible version, you need to pick the "accessible resources" link in its online lab. When images appear in the book, on the accessible version, you select the link labeled "D" for their description. Pearson did an outstanding job with the textbook. Some of the lab exercises are not accessible, but it's only a few of them. --Debee From: athen-list On Behalf Of Kevin Price Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2023 7:10 AM To: Access Technology Higher Education Network Subject: [Athen] Accessible Online Spanish Learning Platform Hi Atheners, We have a student interested in taking Spanish in the Fall. He is a Screen Reader user (JAWS) and he will need to take the course online. Is there any online Spanish platform that you have that is accessible and you would recommend? Kevin Price, MSW Assistant Director of Accessible Technology Student Accessibility Services Ginsburg Center for Inclusion and Community Engagement University of Central Florida 4000 Central Florida Blvd Ferrell Commons, Room 155B Orlando, FL 32816-3661 Office: 407.823.2371 kevin.price@ucf.edu sas.sdes.ucf.edu Please note: Florida has a very broad open records law (F.S. 119). Emails may be subject to public disclosure. SAS acknowledges the value of expressing identity-first (disabled person) and person first (person with disability) language in our communication. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From armstrongdeborah at fhda.edu Fri Jun 2 09:27:58 2023 From: armstrongdeborah at fhda.edu (Deborah Armstrong) Date: Fri Jun 2 09:28:03 2023 Subject: [Athen] Fillable forms in Word Message-ID: I've been experimenting with the latest Office 365 Word (desktop client) to make fillable forms using controls on the developer tab. It's super easy to do, and as a screen reader user, fully accessible for me to create these forms. But I've had a few disappointments. If I save a form as a PDF, it's not fillable. I was hoping to find a way as a screen reader user to make a fillable PDF. We've got all these inaccessible forms on campus, and I want to be part of the solution - not just someone complaining about them! I've also found it can be a little challenging to fill out a Word form without accidentally entering content. You have to carefully tab to the control and activate it with enter. If you press enter in the wrong place, you create an empty paragraph. So though accessible, it's a little confusing for a keyboard user. Another problem with Word forms is that designers often include the fields within tables. Tab is used to both navigate between cells and to navigate to fields, so again, that adds a lot of confusion. I also find that if you don't need a legal signature, and you just need a form filled out, it's a very accessible process to use the online Office app to create and/or fill out accessible forms. What I particularly like about Office 365 forms is that people who know nothing about accessibility seem to create accessible forms by default. The online version of Word doesn't have a developer tab; you have to use Office 365 forms if you want to create a form that is fillable online and whose results can be reported back to you. Google forms are also easy to create and fill using a screen reader. And ditto for SurveyMonkey. With all these accessible options, I do wish people would stop using PDFS, but we use Adobe sign and people love it! --Debee -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dandrews920 at comcast.net Fri Jun 2 10:27:32 2023 From: dandrews920 at comcast.net (dandrews920@comcast.net) Date: Fri Jun 2 10:28:01 2023 Subject: [Athen] Fillable forms in Word In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <049801d99577$866875e0$933961a0$@comcast.net> In the past, Word forms have been a disaster, from an accessibility point of view. PDF forms are possible, but a lot of work to do. The best options might be on-line forms programs from Microsoft, Google etc. Dave From: athen-list On Behalf Of Deborah Armstrong Sent: Friday, June 2, 2023 11:28 AM To: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network' Subject: [Athen] Fillable forms in Word I've been experimenting with the latest Office 365 Word (desktop client) to make fillable forms using controls on the developer tab. It's super easy to do, and as a screen reader user, fully accessible for me to create these forms. But I've had a few disappointments. If I save a form as a PDF, it's not fillable. I was hoping to find a way as a screen reader user to make a fillable PDF. We've got all these inaccessible forms on campus, and I want to be part of the solution - not just someone complaining about them! I've also found it can be a little challenging to fill out a Word form without accidentally entering content. You have to carefully tab to the control and activate it with enter. If you press enter in the wrong place, you create an empty paragraph. So though accessible, it's a little confusing for a keyboard user. Another problem with Word forms is that designers often include the fields within tables. Tab is used to both navigate between cells and to navigate to fields, so again, that adds a lot of confusion. I also find that if you don't need a legal signature, and you just need a form filled out, it's a very accessible process to use the online Office app to create and/or fill out accessible forms. What I particularly like about Office 365 forms is that people who know nothing about accessibility seem to create accessible forms by default. The online version of Word doesn't have a developer tab; you have to use Office 365 forms if you want to create a form that is fillable online and whose results can be reported back to you. Google forms are also easy to create and fill using a screen reader. And ditto for SurveyMonkey. With all these accessible options, I do wish people would stop using PDFS, but we use Adobe sign and people love it! --Debee -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From K4mccall at outlook.com Fri Jun 2 10:34:21 2023 From: K4mccall at outlook.com (Karen McCall) Date: Fri Jun 2 10:34:25 2023 Subject: [Athen] Fillable forms in Word In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: This is a common set of questions/issues. While you can add content controls, legacy form controls and/or ActiveX form controls in Word, they are not accessible to fill out. Content controls were never designed to be accessible. They were introduced in Office 2007 and, as their name indicates, are there to add content when creating templates. There are NO radio buttons in the set of content controls. If you want to explore content controls, take a look at the gallery of Tables of Content you can add to a document. The gallery creates a TOC using content controls. Always use the "Create Table of Contents" or "Custom Table of Contents" to create a TOC! Alt + S, T, C. Visually, they look like a text box with a tab in the upper left. Content controls have several issues: 1. They are still keyboard traps despite some minor improvements. 2. We are never notified when entering or exiting a content control. 3. Adaptive technology does not read the Tooltips. 4. They cannot be resized. 5. Any improvements to content controls are NOT backward compatible! When either the legacy form controls or the ActiveX form controls are added to a Word document, in order for them to gain focus to be filled out, the rest of the document or significant sections of it MUST be protected. This means that someone using TTS or screen readers will not have access to any instructions that might be available to those who can see the form. I've had to remediate these types of forms over the past two or three years and even with 15-20 form controls on a page, Word crashes or the adaptive technology crashes or they both crash at the same time. Explaining why you can't convert a form in Word that has form controls to a tagged PDF form takes a bit more explanation. When form controls are created in a Word document, they can't be resized and their attributes are minimal. They are designed, by default, to live in Word. IF they could be converted to tagged PDF, they would not be able to be resized automatically to fit content. Form controls that expand in PDFs are XFA forms, not PDF forms. When a form control is added in a PDF form template, they can be resized to some extent/allowing for spacing and there are attributes like setting the font to auto size among other attributes. Form controls that expand as content is added in a form that is viewed in a PDF reader are called XFA forms (Extensible form Architecture). You need a tool like the old LiveCycle Designer or the reinvention of LiveCycle Designer, Form Designer, to create XFA forms where the form controls expand as text is added to them in the PDF reader. BUT... Currently there is no standard for XFA forms or are known as "dynamic PDF" forms and no accessibility standards. They can't be validated by any of the existing PDF accessibility checkers. Someone made a weak attempt to create an accessibility checker add-on for Form Designer but without a standard to go by, it was useless. The PDF readers are only used to view an XFA form. Being able to open a dynamic PDF in Acrobat does not mean it is a static PDF form or that it magically converts to a static PDF form. Without any standards for XFA forms, as they expand over pages with content, the adaptive technology cannot keep up with the refreshing and often loses focus even when trying to go back and edit the answer. Content controls in Word are a good example of an XFA form type. They appear small but just start adding content and they expand to fit the content. It would cost an exorbitant amount of development funding and resources to develop Word to the point where it would become an form designer that would allow for the conversion of form controls to tagged PDF. Even Adobe has separated Acrobat rom Form Designer. They are two different applications with different pricing options. You can't check the accessibility of a dynamic or static XFA form in Acrobat. The best approach to designing forms in Word is to use the accessible document techniques you know...columns, Tab Stops, headings and so forth to create the form. Use tables ONLY for rating questions, not other parts of the form template. Do not use symbols to represent radio buttons, lines or check boxes! Odds are you'll have to artifact them. Additionally, you'll need to make the form controls large enough to cover them up. If someone gets a Word version of the form, those who can see the form will start clicking on the squares or circles thinking they are real form controls, not placeholders for form controls. Save the Word form template as a tagged PDF, add the form controls, then add the form tags and their annotations to the Tags Tree. Remember to add the Tooltips for all form controls. If you want lines for those who might print the form, use the Appearance tab in the Acrobat form control Properties dialog to add an "underline" to the form control itself. In regard to ToolTips: 1. In Word, they often don't work, even if you have them added in the two places that are suggested. 2. The ToolTips or support text for content controls has never worked. 3. You can't go into a content control that you need to add content to by pressing Enter. 4. Always check your Tooltips with a screen reader or TTS to see if there are spelling mistakes! I just dis an overview of accessible PDF forms for the Guelph Accessibility Conference and have two proposals in for AHG: a pre-conference workshop on accessible PDF forms and a two hour general session on creating a form template. Let me know if you have other questions. Cheers, Karen From: athen-list On Behalf Of Deborah Armstrong Sent: Friday, June 2, 2023 12:28 PM To: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network' Subject: [Athen] Fillable forms in Word I've been experimenting with the latest Office 365 Word (desktop client) to make fillable forms using controls on the developer tab. It's super easy to do, and as a screen reader user, fully accessible for me to create these forms. But I've had a few disappointments. If I save a form as a PDF, it's not fillable. I was hoping to find a way as a screen reader user to make a fillable PDF. We've got all these inaccessible forms on campus, and I want to be part of the solution - not just someone complaining about them! I've also found it can be a little challenging to fill out a Word form without accidentally entering content. You have to carefully tab to the control and activate it with enter. If you press enter in the wrong place, you create an empty paragraph. So though accessible, it's a little confusing for a keyboard user. Another problem with Word forms is that designers often include the fields within tables. Tab is used to both navigate between cells and to navigate to fields, so again, that adds a lot of confusion. I also find that if you don't need a legal signature, and you just need a form filled out, it's a very accessible process to use the online Office app to create and/or fill out accessible forms. What I particularly like about Office 365 forms is that people who know nothing about accessibility seem to create accessible forms by default. The online version of Word doesn't have a developer tab; you have to use Office 365 forms if you want to create a form that is fillable online and whose results can be reported back to you. Google forms are also easy to create and fill using a screen reader. And ditto for SurveyMonkey. With all these accessible options, I do wish people would stop using PDFS, but we use Adobe sign and people love it! --Debee -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From K4mccall at outlook.com Fri Jun 2 11:04:05 2023 From: K4mccall at outlook.com (Karen McCall) Date: Fri Jun 2 11:04:09 2023 Subject: [Athen] Fillable forms in Word In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I forgot to say that the static PDF forms are the ones you create in Acrobat. They are your regular every day PDF forms that can be made accessible. You can make static PDF forms in a tool like form designer, but you cannot check the accessibility of those forms in Acrobat, because you?ve used an XFA form designer, to create the static/regular every day PDF forms. Cheers, Karen. Sent from Outlook for iOS ________________________________ From: athen-list on behalf of Karen McCall Sent: Friday, June 2, 2023 1:34:21 PM To: Access Technology Higher Education Network Subject: Re: [Athen] Fillable forms in Word This is a common set of questions/issues. While you can add content controls, legacy form controls and/or ActiveX form controls in Word, they are not accessible to fill out. Content controls were never designed to be accessible. They were introduced in Office 2007 and, as their name indicates, are there to add content when creating templates. There are NO radio buttons in the set of content controls. If you want to explore content controls, take a look at the gallery of Tables of Content you can add to a document. The gallery creates a TOC using content controls. Always use the ?Create Table of Contents? or ?Custom Table of Contents? to create a TOC! Alt + S, T, C. Visually, they look like a text box with a tab in the upper left. Content controls have several issues: 1. They are still keyboard traps despite some minor improvements. 2. We are never notified when entering or exiting a content control. 3. Adaptive technology does not read the Tooltips. 4. They cannot be resized. 5. Any improvements to content controls are NOT backward compatible! When either the legacy form controls or the ActiveX form controls are added to a Word document, in order for them to gain focus to be filled out, the rest of the document or significant sections of it MUST be protected. This means that someone using TTS or screen readers will not have access to any instructions that might be available to those who can see the form. I?ve had to remediate these types of forms over the past two or three years and even with 15-20 form controls on a page, Word crashes or the adaptive technology crashes or they both crash at the same time. Explaining why you can?t convert a form in Word that has form controls to a tagged PDF form takes a bit more explanation. When form controls are created in a Word document, they can?t be resized and their attributes are minimal. They are designed, by default, to live in Word. IF they could be converted to tagged PDF, they would not be able to be resized automatically to fit content. Form controls that expand in PDFs are XFA forms, not PDF forms. When a form control is added in a PDF form template, they can be resized to some extent/allowing for spacing and there are attributes like setting the font to auto size among other attributes. Form controls that expand as content is added in a form that is viewed in a PDF reader are called XFA forms (Extensible form Architecture). You need a tool like the old LiveCycle Designer or the reinvention of LiveCycle Designer, Form Designer, to create XFA forms where the form controls expand as text is added to them in the PDF reader. BUT? Currently there is no standard for XFA forms or are known as ?dynamic PDF? forms and no accessibility standards. They can?t be validated by any of the existing PDF accessibility checkers. Someone made a weak attempt to create an accessibility checker add-on for Form Designer but without a standard to go by, it was useless. The PDF readers are only used to view an XFA form. Being able to open a dynamic PDF in Acrobat does not mean it is a static PDF form or that it magically converts to a static PDF form. Without any standards for XFA forms, as they expand over pages with content, the adaptive technology cannot keep up with the refreshing and often loses focus even when trying to go back and edit the answer. Content controls in Word are a good example of an XFA form type. They appear small but just start adding content and they expand to fit the content. It would cost an exorbitant amount of development funding and resources to develop Word to the point where it would become an form designer that would allow for the conversion of form controls to tagged PDF. Even Adobe has separated Acrobat rom Form Designer. They are two different applications with different pricing options. You can?t check the accessibility of a dynamic or static XFA form in Acrobat. The best approach to designing forms in Word is to use the accessible document techniques you know?columns, Tab Stops, headings and so forth to create the form. Use tables ONLY for rating questions, not other parts of the form template. Do not use symbols to represent radio buttons, lines or check boxes! Odds are you?ll have to artifact them. Additionally, you?ll need to make the form controls large enough to cover them up. If someone gets a Word version of the form, those who can see the form will start clicking on the squares or circles thinking they are real form controls, not placeholders for form controls. Save the Word form template as a tagged PDF, add the form controls, then add the form tags and their annotations to the Tags Tree. Remember to add the Tooltips for all form controls. If you want lines for those who might print the form, use the Appearance tab in the Acrobat form control Properties dialog to add an ?underline? to the form control itself. In regard to ToolTips: 1. In Word, they often don?t work, even if you have them added in the two places that are suggested. 2. The ToolTips or support text for content controls has never worked. 3. You can?t go into a content control that you need to add content to by pressing Enter. 4. Always check your Tooltips with a screen reader or TTS to see if there are spelling mistakes! I just dis an overview of accessible PDF forms for the Guelph Accessibility Conference and have two proposals in for AHG: a pre-conference workshop on accessible PDF forms and a two hour general session on creating a form template. Let me know if you have other questions. Cheers, Karen From: athen-list On Behalf Of Deborah Armstrong Sent: Friday, June 2, 2023 12:28 PM To: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network' Subject: [Athen] Fillable forms in Word I?ve been experimenting with the latest Office 365 Word (desktop client) to make fillable forms using controls on the developer tab. It?s super easy to do, and as a screen reader user, fully accessible for me to create these forms. But I?ve had a few disappointments. If I save a form as a PDF, it?s not fillable. I was hoping to find a way as a screen reader user to make a fillable PDF. We?ve got all these inaccessible forms on campus, and I want to be part of the solution ? not just someone complaining about them! I?ve also found it can be a little challenging to fill out a Word form without accidentally entering content. You have to carefully tab to the control and activate it with enter. If you press enter in the wrong place, you create an empty paragraph. So though accessible, it?s a little confusing for a keyboard user. Another problem with Word forms is that designers often include the fields within tables. Tab is used to both navigate between cells and to navigate to fields, so again, that adds a lot of confusion. I also find that if you don?t need a legal signature, and you just need a form filled out, it?s a very accessible process to use the online Office app to create and/or fill out accessible forms. What I particularly like about Office 365 forms is that people who know nothing about accessibility seem to create accessible forms by default. The online version of Word doesn?t have a developer tab; you have to use Office 365 forms if you want to create a form that is fillable online and whose results can be reported back to you. Google forms are also easy to create and fill using a screen reader. And ditto for SurveyMonkey. With all these accessible options, I do wish people would stop using PDFS, but we use Adobe sign and people love it! --Debee -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From molsson at sbctc.edu Fri Jun 2 11:26:45 2023 From: molsson at sbctc.edu (Monica Olsson) Date: Fri Jun 2 11:26:49 2023 Subject: [Athen] Chromebook accessibility? Message-ID: Hello all, Have you investigated Chromebook's accessibility support and compatibly with AT recently? If so, would you mind sharing this information with me? I personally have very little experience with Chromebooks and am trying to help a colleague out whose college is interested in purchasing them for students to use in the classroom and for schoolwork. Below is the list of items he hopes to research and test, it is quite extensive. Any insight or help this community can provide is greatly appreciated! Thanks, Monica * Research existing Chromebook accessibility documentation and find recent user stories from AT users who regularly use the devices * Verify that all built-in assistive technologies are compatible with Google suite, and adequate and functional for a user in 2023 * Test out screen magnification and make sure it is adequate * Test switch access and insure compatibility with common hardware switches * Test voice-control (Dragon-like functionality) and ensure that user experience is consistent. Test with device mic and some common headset mics. * Verify that using Chromevox is comparable to using a screen-reader like Jaws or NVDA and verify that the Google Suite is functionally accessible with Chromevox * Verify claims that braille support (including UEB and Nemeth support) has been improved and works consistently across the Google suite of apps. Verify that braille support works with common braille display hardware. * Finalize an assistive technology training plan for AT users who have Chromebooks and wish to be trained to access Clark resources with them. * Align all of the above with Revised Sec. 508 functional accessibility requirements or with WCAG wherever applicable [Title: SBCTC logo - Description: Compass] Monica M. Olsson (she/her/hers) Policy Associate ? Accessible IT Coordinator Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges ?Email: molsson@sbctc.edu ? Phone: 360-704-3922 The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect. Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web [cid:5768a8de-78c5-452b-a032-315bbb368bd2] Book time to meet with me -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Outlook-Title_ SBC.png Type: image/png Size: 22672 bytes Desc: Outlook-Title_ SBC.png URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Outlook-3oa1ef5p.png Type: image/png Size: 528 bytes Desc: Outlook-3oa1ef5p.png URL: From mikegibson at boisestate.edu Fri Jun 2 13:47:18 2023 From: mikegibson at boisestate.edu (Mike Gibson) Date: Fri Jun 2 13:48:18 2023 Subject: [Athen] Now Hiring: Accessibility Coordinator, Assistive Technology Senior Message-ID: <687bf15d26ecd56b057785e7a1907625@mail.gmail.com> Happy Friday everyone! Boise State University is hiring an Assistive Technology Coordinator, working in the Educational Access Center. Details are available by following the link. https://jobs.boisestate.edu/en-us/job/497645/accessibility-coordinator-assistive-technology-senior Cheers, Mike *-----------* *Mike Gibson* *Deputy ADA Coordinator for Digital Accessibility* *Office of Institutional Compliance and Ethics* Boise State University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From armstrongdeborah at fhda.edu Fri Jun 2 15:12:21 2023 From: armstrongdeborah at fhda.edu (Deborah Armstrong) Date: Fri Jun 2 15:12:28 2023 Subject: [Athen] Fillable forms in Word In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Just wanted to say, I appreciate the time, research and commitment it takes to write this detailed post, and I certainly hope your AHG trainings will be attended! Unfortunately so many forms in the higher ed setting are created by people who are not in any way connected with disability services, and often they have very little interest in learning about accessibility. There's been a huge trend to switch from paper to electronic forms, especially pushed by Covid. On my campus, I see every department converting all their paper forms, but it's a bunch of disparate folks working with disconnected efforts. What we need is a video series for those people, "The Dummies guide to accessible forms" that goes over all of this. Maybe you could market such a beast; if you do I'll start promoting it to my college! Perhaps one day, our state chancellor's office would offer a video series free to all our campuses. --Debee From: athen-list On Behalf Of Karen McCall Sent: Friday, June 2, 2023 10:34 AM To: Access Technology Higher Education Network Subject: Re: [Athen] Fillable forms in Word This is a common set of questions/issues. While you can add content controls, legacy form controls and/or ActiveX form controls in Word, they are not accessible to fill out. Content controls were never designed to be accessible. They were introduced in Office 2007 and, as their name indicates, are there to add content when creating templates. There are NO radio buttons in the set of content controls. If you want to explore content controls, take a look at the gallery of Tables of Content you can add to a document. The gallery creates a TOC using content controls. Always use the "Create Table of Contents" or "Custom Table of Contents" to create a TOC! Alt + S, T, C. Visually, they look like a text box with a tab in the upper left. Content controls have several issues: 1. They are still keyboard traps despite some minor improvements. 2. We are never notified when entering or exiting a content control. 3. Adaptive technology does not read the Tooltips. 4. They cannot be resized. 5. Any improvements to content controls are NOT backward compatible! When either the legacy form controls or the ActiveX form controls are added to a Word document, in order for them to gain focus to be filled out, the rest of the document or significant sections of it MUST be protected. This means that someone using TTS or screen readers will not have access to any instructions that might be available to those who can see the form. I've had to remediate these types of forms over the past two or three years and even with 15-20 form controls on a page, Word crashes or the adaptive technology crashes or they both crash at the same time. Explaining why you can't convert a form in Word that has form controls to a tagged PDF form takes a bit more explanation. When form controls are created in a Word document, they can't be resized and their attributes are minimal. They are designed, by default, to live in Word. IF they could be converted to tagged PDF, they would not be able to be resized automatically to fit content. Form controls that expand in PDFs are XFA forms, not PDF forms. When a form control is added in a PDF form template, they can be resized to some extent/allowing for spacing and there are attributes like setting the font to auto size among other attributes. Form controls that expand as content is added in a form that is viewed in a PDF reader are called XFA forms (Extensible form Architecture). You need a tool like the old LiveCycle Designer or the reinvention of LiveCycle Designer, Form Designer, to create XFA forms where the form controls expand as text is added to them in the PDF reader. BUT... Currently there is no standard for XFA forms or are known as "dynamic PDF" forms and no accessibility standards. They can't be validated by any of the existing PDF accessibility checkers. Someone made a weak attempt to create an accessibility checker add-on for Form Designer but without a standard to go by, it was useless. The PDF readers are only used to view an XFA form. Being able to open a dynamic PDF in Acrobat does not mean it is a static PDF form or that it magically converts to a static PDF form. Without any standards for XFA forms, as they expand over pages with content, the adaptive technology cannot keep up with the refreshing and often loses focus even when trying to go back and edit the answer. Content controls in Word are a good example of an XFA form type. They appear small but just start adding content and they expand to fit the content. It would cost an exorbitant amount of development funding and resources to develop Word to the point where it would become an form designer that would allow for the conversion of form controls to tagged PDF. Even Adobe has separated Acrobat rom Form Designer. They are two different applications with different pricing options. You can't check the accessibility of a dynamic or static XFA form in Acrobat. The best approach to designing forms in Word is to use the accessible document techniques you know...columns, Tab Stops, headings and so forth to create the form. Use tables ONLY for rating questions, not other parts of the form template. Do not use symbols to represent radio buttons, lines or check boxes! Odds are you'll have to artifact them. Additionally, you'll need to make the form controls large enough to cover them up. If someone gets a Word version of the form, those who can see the form will start clicking on the squares or circles thinking they are real form controls, not placeholders for form controls. Save the Word form template as a tagged PDF, add the form controls, then add the form tags and their annotations to the Tags Tree. Remember to add the Tooltips for all form controls. If you want lines for those who might print the form, use the Appearance tab in the Acrobat form control Properties dialog to add an "underline" to the form control itself. In regard to ToolTips: 1. In Word, they often don't work, even if you have them added in the two places that are suggested. 2. The ToolTips or support text for content controls has never worked. 3. You can't go into a content control that you need to add content to by pressing Enter. 4. Always check your Tooltips with a screen reader or TTS to see if there are spelling mistakes! I just dis an overview of accessible PDF forms for the Guelph Accessibility Conference and have two proposals in for AHG: a pre-conference workshop on accessible PDF forms and a two hour general session on creating a form template. Let me know if you have other questions. Cheers, Karen From: athen-list > On Behalf Of Deborah Armstrong Sent: Friday, June 2, 2023 12:28 PM To: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network' > Subject: [Athen] Fillable forms in Word I've been experimenting with the latest Office 365 Word (desktop client) to make fillable forms using controls on the developer tab. It's super easy to do, and as a screen reader user, fully accessible for me to create these forms. But I've had a few disappointments. If I save a form as a PDF, it's not fillable. I was hoping to find a way as a screen reader user to make a fillable PDF. We've got all these inaccessible forms on campus, and I want to be part of the solution - not just someone complaining about them! I've also found it can be a little challenging to fill out a Word form without accidentally entering content. You have to carefully tab to the control and activate it with enter. If you press enter in the wrong place, you create an empty paragraph. So though accessible, it's a little confusing for a keyboard user. Another problem with Word forms is that designers often include the fields within tables. Tab is used to both navigate between cells and to navigate to fields, so again, that adds a lot of confusion. I also find that if you don't need a legal signature, and you just need a form filled out, it's a very accessible process to use the online Office app to create and/or fill out accessible forms. What I particularly like about Office 365 forms is that people who know nothing about accessibility seem to create accessible forms by default. The online version of Word doesn't have a developer tab; you have to use Office 365 forms if you want to create a form that is fillable online and whose results can be reported back to you. Google forms are also easy to create and fill using a screen reader. And ditto for SurveyMonkey. With all these accessible options, I do wish people would stop using PDFS, but we use Adobe sign and people love it! --Debee -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From armstrongdeborah at fhda.edu Fri Jun 2 15:46:12 2023 From: armstrongdeborah at fhda.edu (Deborah Armstrong) Date: Fri Jun 2 15:46:26 2023 Subject: [Athen] NLS eReader Message-ID: If you have students who read Braille, but do not have a Braille display you might like to know that if the student is a U.S. citizen and a patron of the National library service, they can borrow a Braille display for free. It's called the NLS eReader, and it has twenty Braille cells. This YouTube video (16) Physical Description - NLS eReader HumanWare How-To Series - YouTube Describes one of the two models. There's a whole YouTube series on the two models NLS offers. The devices can read data from USB thumb drives or SD card and can be connected to a Mac or PC to transfer files. They automatically convert material to UEB or ebae (old-school grade 2) or uncontracted Braille. They cannot take notes, but can be a Braille display for an iDevice, PC or Mac. The formats they can read include text, word, BRF and my favorite, Daisy. They can access NLS BARD, bookshare and NFB Newsline to automatically download materials. Though they cannot browse the web, they can connect to wi-fi to download books from those services. Students need to be connected with their regional library which is part of NLS and they may be on a waiting list as these eReaders are not yet available from every regional library in the country. The last count I heard was that thirty-five libraries have them, but NLS intends that all Braille-reading active patrons will be able to borrow one. Being able to navigate Daisy files is especially nice with textbooks that contain good markup. If you are transcribing material in to Braille that is literary (history, English, humanities for example) you can save yourself a lot of effort if your student already has a device that will do it automatically. If, for example you mark up a word document with headings and save it as Daisy, the NLS eReader will automatically convert it to Braille and give the user the ability to quickly navigate the book, much more efficient than navigating hardcopy Braille. The devices have a concept integrated in their firmware called "Braille Reflow" which makes reading on only twenty cells actually pleasurable! With previous Braille displays, the user wasted time trying to deal with hardcopy formatting, blank lines and lines that wrapped inconveniently for twenty cells. This problem has been fixed with the new eReader firmware. Students will still need hardcopy Braille for technical STEM-oriented subjects. Blind students who depend only on audio are at a disadvantage, so I really encourage you to look in to this for any students you know who can read Braille. --Debee -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foreigntype at gmail.com Fri Jun 2 16:44:11 2023 From: foreigntype at gmail.com (Wink Harner) Date: Fri Jun 2 16:44:19 2023 Subject: [Athen] NLS eReader Message-ID: Debbee Thank you for this comprehensive and very well done review of the NLS Braille reader. Wink Harner On June 2, 2023, at 3:46 PM, Deborah Armstrong wrote: If you have students who read Braille, but do not have a Braille display you might like to know that if the student is a U.S. citizen and a patron of the National library service, they can borrow a Braille display for free. It?s called the NLS eReader, and it has twenty Braille cells. This YouTube video (16) Physical Description - NLS eReader HumanWare How-To Series - YouTube Describes one of the two models. There?s a whole YouTube series on the two models NLS offers. The devices can read data from USB thumb drives or SD card and can be connected to a Mac or PC to transfer files. They automatically convert material to UEB or ebae (old-school grade 2) or uncontracted Braille. They cannot take notes, but can be a Braille display for an iDevice, PC or Mac. The formats they can read include text, word, BRF and my favorite, Daisy. They can access NLS BARD, bookshare and NFB Newsline to automatically download materials. Though they cannot browse the web, they can connect to wi-fi to download books from those services. Students need to be connected with their regional library which is part of NLS and they may be on a waiting list as these eReaders are not yet available from every regional library in the country. The last count I heard was that thirty-five libraries have them, but NLS intends that all Braille-reading active patrons will be able to borrow one. Being able to navigate Daisy files is especially nice with textbooks that contain good markup. If you are transcribing material in to Braille that is literary (history, English, humanities for example)? you can save yourself a lot of effort if your student already has a device that will do it automatically. If, for example you mark up a word document with headings and save it as Daisy, the NLS eReader will automatically convert it to Braille and give the user the ability to quickly navigate the book, much more efficient than navigating hardcopy Braille. The devices have a concept integrated in their firmware called ?Braille Reflow? which makes reading on only twenty cells actually pleasurable! With previous Braille displays, the user wasted time trying to deal with hardcopy formatting, blank lines and lines that wrapped inconveniently for twenty cells. This problem has been fixed with the new eReader firmware. Students will still need hardcopy Braille for technical STEM-oriented subjects. Blind students who depend only on audio are at a disadvantage, so I really encourage you to look in to this for any students you know who can read Braille. --Debee ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Susan.Kelmer at colorado.edu Mon Jun 5 06:45:44 2023 From: Susan.Kelmer at colorado.edu (Susan Kelmer) Date: Mon Jun 5 06:45:50 2023 Subject: [Athen] My opinion on Bookshare In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Most people on this list know my opinion of Bookshare files. I am definitely not a fan. For an organization that receives a massive amount of government funding, I expect Bookshare files to be nearly perfect. Tables and math formatting done properly, page numbers included, intact indexes, pristine heading/styles structure, all images in place with alt-tag descriptions, the works. If I were producing files of such low quality for my students, I?d have had my pants sued off already. To get these terrible files from an organization that is out there convincing publishers that their format is perfect is just unconscionable, in my opinion. Even worse, the time I spend remediating these files is longer than it would take for me to take the original PDF print format of the book and create accessible content in Word or HTML with all of the above in place as it should be. Tables, images with alt-text, properly formatted page numbers, styles/headings, every portion of the book intact including the TOC, index, appendices, copyright page (at the FRONT where it belongs!), etc. How is a Bookshare file a solution, when it requires MORE work to make it truly accessible for ALL students? Yes, I?m very outspoken, but I?ve been working with providing alternate format for all types of students with print disabilities for 24 years. I think I have a pretty good grasp of what academic reading needs to entail for students, and files with missing or misplaced elements, lack of proper navigation, and riddled with multiple errors just make me so angry. There have been only a handful of Bookshare files that I?ve worked with over the years that I thought were acceptable as-is for student use. Asking faculty to scour meta-data to pick which book is most accessible? Since when do faculty even know how to read meta-data and know whether it is good or not for a student with a print disability? Why are we expecting them to do this work, when they are not the experts? And should publishers do better? Yes, they should for ethical and moral reasons, but we also need to remember that publishers are under no legal obligation to provide us with files, much less provide us with accessible files. There is no money it in, and there are no toothy laws that would require them to do this work. Publishers aren?t in the business of printing books. They are in the business of making money. Every business is in the business of making money. No legal requirement means they aren?t going to spend the money to fix this problem. The ultimate burden rests on the campuses that are required to provide accessible alternate format to students with documented print disabilities. We can continue to rant about publishers, but until the law changes, we are stuck where we are. Where I take exception with Bookshare is that they claim to be ?born accessible,? but in reality, so many elements are missing, or done improperly, that they should not be claiming that they are ?born accessible,? or even accessible at all. They are not, and the quality is incredibly poor. And don?t even get me started on how bad the BRF files from Bookshare are. My goodness. Easier to create from scratch than try to fix it. Bookshare has a long way to go before they are truly providing a product that ALL students can use, providing files of multiple types that are perfectly formatted and accessible, and work with multiple types of reading technology, up to and including refreshable Braille displays or being able to print to hard-copy Braille. Students with print disabilities come in a wide spectrum of reading difficulties. Files produced need to meet these needs, on an individual basis to each student based on their needs. Can one format work for multiple needs? Of course ? but the resulting format needs to be done with quality and attention to detail, including all elements of the original material in the produced format. And that last thing is the biggest glaring problem with Bookshare files. Susan Kelmer Alternate Format Production Program Manager Disability Services Health and Wellness Services T 303 735 4836 www.colorado.edu/disabilityservices [cid:image001.png@01D9977F.BBAEDBE0] Due to the nature of electronic communication, the security of this message cannot be guaranteed. If you?ve received this email in error please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 8916 bytes Desc: image001.png URL: From K4mccall at outlook.com Mon Jun 5 07:18:32 2023 From: K4mccall at outlook.com (Karen McCall) Date: Mon Jun 5 07:18:36 2023 Subject: [Athen] Credly Badges Message-ID: Morning Everyone! A while ago I asked the group how important it might be to have micro-credentials" or badges for professional development activities. Well, I jumped into it after careful reflection. Karlen Communications - Badges - Credly If anyone wants to know how successful this venture is as I go along, please e-mail me off-list. It is a new area of professional development "validation" and I'm not sure how successful it will be. The Ontario government is "all in" on these micro-credentials but there doesn't seem to be a framework except in the EU. I also notice that many colleges and universities offer these types of badges. At the recent Guelph Accessibility Conference, there was interest in getting a badge for attending a session. As I say, we'll see how it goes and I'm willing to share anything I learn from this experience! Cheers, Karen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From enews at toptechtidbits.com Mon Jun 5 12:38:21 2023 From: enews at toptechtidbits.com (Top Tech Tidbits) Date: Mon Jun 5 12:38:25 2023 Subject: [Athen] My opinion on Bookshare In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <003501d997e5$4930cc20$db926460$@toptechtidbits.com> Hello Karen, I was wondering if you might consider allowing us to share this post as an article on the Access Information News website? I think access readers across the community would really benefit from your insight. You can email me off-list at publisher@accessinformationnews.com if you?re interested. If not, that?s okay too. Really appreciate your insight. ? Aaron Di Blasi, PMP Publisher (2020-Present) Top Tech Tidbits The Week's News in Adaptive Technology https://toptechtidbits.com ? Publisher (2022-Present) Access Information News The Week's News in Access Information https://accessinformationnews.com ? Sr. Project Management Professional (2006-Present) Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd. Innovative ideas. Solutions that perform. https://mvsltd.com ? Email: enews@toptechtidbits.com ? Subscribe (Free): https://toptechtidbits.com/subscribe Subscribe (Premium): https://toptechtidbits.com/premium Donate: https://toptechtidbits.com/donate Sponsor: https://toptechtidbits.com/sponsor Podcast: https://toptechtidbits.com/podcast Facebook: https://toptechtidbits.com/facebook Twitter: https://toptechtidbits.com/twitter Mastodon: https://toptechtidbits.com/mastodon LinkedIn: https://toptechtidbits.com/linkedin YouTube: https://toptechtidbits.com/youtube RSS: https://toptechtidbits.com/rss Archive: https://toptechtidbits.com/search A Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd. Publication: https://mvsltd.com CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail and attachments, if any, may contain confidential information, which is privileged and protected from disclosure by Federal and State confidentiality laws, rules, and regulations. This e-mail and attachments, if any, are intended for the designated addressee only. If you are not the designated addressee, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this e-mail and its attachments, if any, may be unlawful and may subject you to legal consequences. If you have received this e-mail and attachments in error, please delete the e-mail and its attachments from your computer. From: athen-list On Behalf Of Susan Kelmer Sent: Monday, June 5, 2023 9:46 AM To: Access Technology Higher Education Network Subject: Re: [Athen] My opinion on Bookshare Most people on this list know my opinion of Bookshare files. I am definitely not a fan. For an organization that receives a massive amount of government funding, I expect Bookshare files to be nearly perfect. Tables and math formatting done properly, page numbers included, intact indexes, pristine heading/styles structure, all images in place with alt-tag descriptions, the works. If I were producing files of such low quality for my students, I?d have had my pants sued off already. To get these terrible files from an organization that is out there convincing publishers that their format is perfect is just unconscionable, in my opinion. Even worse, the time I spend remediating these files is longer than it would take for me to take the original PDF print format of the book and create accessible content in Word or HTML with all of the above in place as it should be. Tables, images with alt-text, properly formatted page numbers, styles/headings, every portion of the book intact including the TOC, index, appendices, copyright page (at the FRONT where it belongs!), etc. How is a Bookshare file a solution, when it requires MORE work to make it truly accessible for ALL students? Yes, I?m very outspoken, but I?ve been working with providing alternate format for all types of students with print disabilities for 24 years. I think I have a pretty good grasp of what academic reading needs to entail for students, and files with missing or misplaced elements, lack of proper navigation, and riddled with multiple errors just make me so angry. There have been only a handful of Bookshare files that I?ve worked with over the years that I thought were acceptable as-is for student use. Asking faculty to scour meta-data to pick which book is most accessible? Since when do faculty even know how to read meta-data and know whether it is good or not for a student with a print disability? Why are we expecting them to do this work, when they are not the experts? And should publishers do better? Yes, they should for ethical and moral reasons, but we also need to remember that publishers are under no legal obligation to provide us with files, much less provide us with accessible files. There is no money it in, and there are no toothy laws that would require them to do this work. Publishers aren?t in the business of printing books. They are in the business of making money. Every business is in the business of making money. No legal requirement means they aren?t going to spend the money to fix this problem. The ultimate burden rests on the campuses that are required to provide accessible alternate format to students with documented print disabilities. We can continue to rant about publishers, but until the law changes, we are stuck where we are. Where I take exception with Bookshare is that they claim to be ?born accessible,? but in reality, so many elements are missing, or done improperly, that they should not be claiming that they are ?born accessible,? or even accessible at all. They are not, and the quality is incredibly poor. And don?t even get me started on how bad the BRF files from Bookshare are. My goodness. Easier to create from scratch than try to fix it. Bookshare has a long way to go before they are truly providing a product that ALL students can use, providing files of multiple types that are perfectly formatted and accessible, and work with multiple types of reading technology, up to and including refreshable Braille displays or being able to print to hard-copy Braille. Students with print disabilities come in a wide spectrum of reading difficulties. Files produced need to meet these needs, on an individual basis to each student based on their needs. Can one format work for multiple needs? Of course ? but the resulting format needs to be done with quality and attention to detail, including all elements of the original material in the produced format. And that last thing is the biggest glaring problem with Bookshare files. Susan Kelmer Alternate Format Production Program Manager Disability Services Health and Wellness Services T 303 735 4836 www.colorado.edu/disabilityservices Due to the nature of electronic communication, the security of this message cannot be guaranteed. If you?ve received this email in error please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 26194 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.png Type: image/png Size: 8916 bytes Desc: not available URL: From M.Deeprose at soton.ac.uk Tue Jun 6 02:06:21 2023 From: M.Deeprose at soton.ac.uk (Matthew Deeprose) Date: Tue Jun 6 02:06:33 2023 Subject: [Athen] =?windows-1252?q?International_Ally_User_Group_=96_22_Jun?= =?windows-1252?q?e_2023?= Message-ID: At the next meeting of the International Ally User Group, we?ll find out how one University is using Ally for Web. "Ally for Web" is the sister tool of "Ally for LMS" that we tend to think of when we talk about Ally, but Ally for Web can plug into corporate websites. We?ll also reflect on some of the questions raised from our panel session in April and learn what happened during Anthology?s "Fix Your Content Day" last month. Join us on Thursday 22 June 2023 07:00 PDT / 10:00 EDT / 15:00 BST/ 16:00 CEST / 17:00 TRT / 18:00 GST at the International Ally Group! Session synopses: Ally for Web at University of Arkansas: An Open Conversation. Join Chris Nixon, Director of Digital Design and Development at University of Arkansas for a ?straight-talk? conversation about Ally for Web and how his university uses it. This conversation, interwoven with demonstrations, addresses usability for web accessibility novices and practical considerations for the web-experienced. Community Conversation: Panel Follow-up. Join the follow-up discussion from April's Panel Accessibility Beyond Borders. Led by the user group leaders, we'll be talking about:? - The ?translated? alternative format. - Accessibility training. - Accessibility policies. - Sharing ideas about accessibility projects, campaigns, and more! Find sign-up and joining details on the Ally Community site: https://usergroup.ally.ac/content/perma?id=59350 Best regards Matthew Deeprose University of Southampton From rbeach at KCKCC.EDU Thu Jun 8 09:48:13 2023 From: rbeach at KCKCC.EDU (Robert Beach) Date: Thu Jun 8 09:48:21 2023 Subject: [Athen] Graphiti Message-ID: Hello all, Has anybody used Graphiti at all? More specifically, has anybody used Graphiti in the area of science such as bio engineering? If so, what kinds of results did you get and what issues (other than the price) did you encounter? Are there other technologies similar to Graphiti that you would recommend? Thanks. Robert Lee Beach Assistive Technology Specialist - Student Accessibility & Support Services Kansas City Kansas Community College 7250 State Ave. - Suite # 3384 - Kansas City, KS 66112 O 913-288-7671 | F 913-288-7678 rbeach@kckcc.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From solowoniukr at macewan.ca Mon Jun 12 10:01:28 2023 From: solowoniukr at macewan.ca (Russell Solowoniuk) Date: Mon Jun 12 10:02:48 2023 Subject: [Athen] Retiring -- thank you Message-ID: Hi everyone, I am retiring as of June 16. This will be my last week at work, and I just wanted to thank all of you for the many years of advice, tips and tricks, and overall wonderful and well thought out words of wisdom regarding technology in a post-secondary environment. This list has been invaluable to me. Take care all, Russell Russell Solowoniuk AT Educational Assistant, Access and Disability Resources MacEwan University 7-164K, 10700-104 Ave. Edmonton, AB T5J 4S2 E: solowoniukr@macewan.ca T: 780-497-5826 F: 780-497-4018 macewan.ca [MacEwan Logo] This communication is intended for the use of the recipient to whom it is addressed and may contain confidential, personal, and/or privileged information. Please contact me immediately if you are not the intended recipient of this communication, and do not copy, distribute, or take action relying on it. Any communication received in error, or subsequent reply, should be deleted or destroyed. Please consider the environment before printing this email We acknowledge that the land on which we gather in Treaty Six Territory is the traditional gathering place for many Indigenous people. We honour and respect the history, languages, ceremonies and culture of the First Nations, M?tis and Inuit who call this territory home. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: winmail.dat Type: application/ms-tnef Size: 21391 bytes Desc: not available URL: From foreigntype at gmail.com Mon Jun 12 10:29:47 2023 From: foreigntype at gmail.com (foreigntype@gmail.com) Date: Mon Jun 12 10:30:30 2023 Subject: [Athen] Retiring -- thank you In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Congratulations, Russell. What an honor to have worked with you over the years. Blessings in great abundance for whatever's next for you. Wink Harner Accessibility Consultant/Alternative Text Production The Foreign Type Portland OR foreigntype@gmail.com 480-984-0034 This email was dictated using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Please forgive quirks, misrecognitions, or errata . On Mon, Jun 12, 2023 at 10:03?AM Russell Solowoniuk wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I am retiring as of June 16. This will be my last week at work, and I just > wanted to thank all of you for the many years of advice, tips and tricks, > and overall wonderful and well thought out words of wisdom regarding > technology in a post-secondary environment. This list has been invaluable > to me. > > Take care all, > > Russell > > > Russell Solowoniuk > AT Educational Assistant, Access and Disability Resources > MacEwan University > 7-164K, 10700-104 Ave. > Edmonton, AB T5J 4S2 > E: solowoniukr@macewan.ca > T: 780-497-5826 > F: 780-497-4018 > macewan.ca > [MacEwan Logo] > This communication is intended for the use of the recipient to whom it is > addressed and may contain confidential, personal, and/or privileged > information. Please contact me immediately if you are not the intended > recipient of this communication, and do not copy, distribute, or take > action relying on it. Any communication received in error, or subsequent > reply, should be deleted or destroyed. > Please consider the environment before printing this email > > We acknowledge that the land on which we gather in Treaty Six Territory is > the traditional gathering place for many Indigenous people. We honour and > respect the history, languages, ceremonies and culture of the First > Nations, M?tis and Inuit who call this territory home. > > > > > _______________________________________________ > athen-list mailing list > athen-list@mailman12.u.washington.edu > http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/athen-list > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From info at noat.ca Tue Jun 13 05:00:00 2023 From: info at noat.ca (Network of Assistive Technologists) Date: Tue Jun 13 05:01:54 2023 Subject: [Athen] READER PEN 2 - Supporting All Learners - Friday, June 16, 2023 @ 2:00pm Eastern - NOAT Webinar In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Good day everyone! I am sharing the invite below for any who are interested in joining us for this upcoming webinar, hosted by The Network of Assistive Technologists. Take care, Doug --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Registration is now open * *READER PEN 2 - SUPPORTING ALL LEARNERS * Friday, June 16, 2023 @ 2:00pm Eastern Join us for an overview of the new Reader 2 Pen: the revolutionary handheld Text-to-Speech device. A new, faster Operating System instantly converts the printed word to audio using OCR technology and predictive tech. The Reader Pen scans in 3 languages (English, French, Spanish), contains 6 dictionaries and has ample storage for user-generated notes. We will learn how this simple product builds confidence, empowers the learner and is helping students facing dyslexia and other LD's *LEARNING OUTCOMES* The immediate impact of the product in the classroom and the home. How institutions and school Boards are implementing the Pen - from using the tool with ELL students to reluctant readers. Finally we will briefly explore the role of the device within the Trades and uniformed positions like Firefighters and Police. *For more details and to register, visit www.noat.link/events* *Doug Mantle,* Founder | The Network of Assistive Technologists www.NOAT.ca | info@NOAT.ca -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lagr1108 at fredonia.edu Tue Jun 13 12:23:17 2023 From: lagr1108 at fredonia.edu (Daniel J LaGrow) Date: Tue Jun 13 12:23:31 2023 Subject: [Athen] Accessibility PDF Help Message-ID: Greetings, My name is Daniel LaGrow, I am a new Accessibility Technician at SUNY Fredonia. I need help creating accessible PDF forms in Adobe Acrobat. Many of these PDFs are former word documents that have tables and lists. I have little prior experience in Acrobat, and would truly appreciate any help you can provide. Is there anyone I can contact for assistance for a zoom call or over the phone? Thanks! Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From chagnon at pubcom.com Tue Jun 13 12:41:15 2023 From: chagnon at pubcom.com (chagnon@pubcom.com) Date: Tue Jun 13 12:41:30 2023 Subject: [Athen] Accessibility PDF Help In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <005b01d99e2f$041d2250$0c5766f0$@pubcom.com> Hi Daniel, and welcome to the community! There?s quite a bit to learn about making accessible PDF forms, beginning with how to make an accessible PDF, and then adding the forms and making the whole enchilada accessible. Takes more time than a phone call, that?s for sure . Here are some excellent courses you might consider: * Karen McCall?s accessible PDFs and accessible Forms classes at https://www.karlencommunications.com/products.htm * Bevi Chagnon?s live courses at www.PubCom.com . * Adobe?s freebies on PDF accessibility are decent, but don?t cover everything. But still worthwhile https://adobe.lookbookhq.com/acrobataccessibility * The AHG conference in November most likely will have some sessions on accessible PDFs and forms. https://accessinghigherground.org/ ?Bevi ? ? ? Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | Chagnon@PubCom.com ? ? ? PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing consulting ? training ? development ? design ? sec. 508 services Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/ classes ? ? ? Latest blog-newsletter ? Simple Guide to Writing Alt-Text From: athen-list On Behalf Of Daniel J LaGrow Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2023 3:23 PM To: athen-list@u.washington.edu Subject: [Athen] Accessibility PDF Help Greetings, My name is Daniel LaGrow, I am a new Accessibility Technician at SUNY Fredonia. I need help creating accessible PDF forms in Adobe Acrobat. Many of these PDFs are former word documents that have tables and lists. I have little prior experience in Acrobat, and would truly appreciate any help you can provide. Is there anyone I can contact for assistance for a zoom call or over the phone? Thanks! Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From K4mccall at outlook.com Wed Jun 14 06:47:16 2023 From: K4mccall at outlook.com (Karen McCall) Date: Wed Jun 14 06:47:20 2023 Subject: [Athen] Accessibility PDF Help In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Morning Daniel! Do you have time either tomorrow morning or Friday morning between 9 AM and 11 AM EST? If so, let me know and I?ll schedule a Zoom meeting. In the meantime, I?ll take a look at the forms attached. Cheers, Karen From: athen-list On Behalf Of Daniel J LaGrow Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2023 3:23 PM To: athen-list@u.washington.edu Subject: [Athen] Accessibility PDF Help Greetings, My name is Daniel LaGrow, I am a new Accessibility Technician at SUNY Fredonia. I need help creating accessible PDF forms in Adobe Acrobat. Many of these PDFs are former word documents that have tables and lists. I have little prior experience in Acrobat, and would truly appreciate any help you can provide. Is there anyone I can contact for assistance for a zoom call or over the phone? Thanks! Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lnorwich at bu.edu Wed Jun 21 13:57:32 2023 From: lnorwich at bu.edu (Norwich, Lorraine S) Date: Wed Jun 21 13:57:37 2023 Subject: [Athen] Reading graphs Message-ID: Dear All, Hope your summer is going well. We have a student who is a Jaws user who is going to take an economics class with a lot of graphs. What thoughts and ideas you have to share would be great. Thanks Lorraine Lorraine S. Norwich, BSME, MSIS Assistant Director of Disability & Access Services 25 Buick Street 3rd Floor, Boston MA 02215 lnorwich@bu.edu (email) 617-353-3658 (vox) 617-353-9646 (fax) www.bu.edu/disability (website) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sloraas at austincc.edu Wed Jun 21 14:14:21 2023 From: sloraas at austincc.edu (Sean Loraas) Date: Wed Jun 21 14:14:36 2023 Subject: [Athen] CASAS Adult Ed standardized testing products Message-ID: Colleagues, Has anyone managed to provide students using screen reader & TTS technology an equitable standardized testing experience taking any of the CASAS adult education testing products? We are trying to do some testing of the platform and assessments, but haven't had success gaining access to the content. When we did we found image based pages without descriptions. I don't think this was their "accessible" product. Just wondering if all the claims of "screen reader accessible" checks out for students' usability. Concerned about math reading properly, with described visuals. We have students with visual disabilities who don't read Braille or tactile graphics. We have found a lot if emphasis on reader/scribe as the go-to accommodation. Can a screen reader user take their accessible assessment without human assistance? Thank you all in advance for your time and expertise. Best, Sean Loraas Accessibility Technician Alt. Text & Media Austin Community College Eastview Campus Office: 2140 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ali.steenis at bellevuecollege.edu Wed Jun 21 15:30:08 2023 From: ali.steenis at bellevuecollege.edu (Ali Steenis) Date: Wed Jun 21 15:30:14 2023 Subject: [Athen] Searching for Braille Math Book Message-ID: Hi all, I'm searching for an already embossed, BRF, or accessible Word with accessible math for the following title. We will send out to have it prepared if needed but wanted to check here first. Title: Mathematics with Applications in the Management, Natural and Social Sciences Authors: Lial, Margaret L.; Hungerford, Thomas W.; Holcomb, John P.; Mullins, Bernadette Edition: 13th Copyright: 2023-2024 ISBN: 9780137892198 Publisher: Pearson Warmly, Ali Steenis Pronouns: she/her Alternative Formats Access Specialist: Disability Resource Center (DRC) Direct Phone: (425) 564-2605 Bellevue College, U001L DRC Fax: (425) 564-5110 3000 Landerholm Circle S.E. Bellevue, WA., 98007 Connect With a BC Mental Health Counselor or View Mental Health Resources We want to hear from you! Please share your thoughts with us. drc@bellevuecollege.edu www.bellevuecollege.edu/drc This email and any files transmitted may contain confidential information as protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), 20 USC ? 1232g and/or Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. ? 2510-2521. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, or distribution is prohibited. Furthermore, if you are not the intended recipient, please notify me immediately by telephone or return e-mail and completely delete this message from your system. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lissner.2 at osu.edu Thu Jun 22 09:35:39 2023 From: lissner.2 at osu.edu (Lissner, L. Scott) Date: Thu Jun 22 09:35:55 2023 Subject: [Athen] Reading graphs In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The student?s past experience, or lack of it) is going to be a determining factor. Broadly * there are equations the describe graphs but require unusual math skills * Tactile graphics (raised or embossed lines) * Visual descriptions * Manipulables in 3D * Sonifacation (cool but a very unique skill set) You might look at american Printing-house for the Blind. And the royal national institute for the blind in the UK Get Outlook for iOS ________________________________ From: athen-list on behalf of Norwich, Lorraine S Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2023 4:57:32 PM To: Access Technology Higher Education Network ; ALTMEDIA@LISTSERV.CCCNEXT.NET Subject: [Athen] Reading graphs Dear All, Hope your summer is going well. We have a student who is a Jaws user who is going to take an economics class with a lot of graphs. What thoughts and ideas you have to share would be great. Thanks Lorraine Lorraine S. Norwich, BSME, Dear All, Hope your summer is going well. We have a student who is a Jaws user who is going to take an economics class with a lot of graphs. What thoughts and ideas you have to share would be great. Thanks Lorraine Lorraine S. Norwich, BSME, MSIS Assistant Director of Disability & Access Services 25 Buick Street 3rd Floor, Boston MA 02215 lnorwich@bu.edu (email) 617-353-3658 (vox) 617-353-9646 (fax) www.bu.edu/disability (website) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From heather.mariger at chemeketa.edu Thu Jun 22 13:06:37 2023 From: heather.mariger at chemeketa.edu (Heather Mariger) Date: Thu Jun 22 13:06:47 2023 Subject: [Athen] Flip Cards in Canvas Message-ID: Greetings, I apologize for the cross posting (I need all the help I can get)... I have a faculty member who wants to use flip cards in Canvas. He found this article: Create CSS Flip cards in Canvas While I have a *very* basic understanding of CSS and HTML, I am in no way qualified to determine if this technique is fully keyboard accessible (I rather suspect not). So, I am reaching out to you brilliant people to ask if these instructions are actually accessible or if you know of a way to make accessible flip cards in Canvas. Thanks so much! H. *Heather Mariger* *Digital Accessibility Advocate* *Pronouns: She/Her* *Center for Academic Innovation* *Chemeketa Community College* *4000 Lancaster Drive NE - 9/126A* *Salem, OR 97305* 503.589.7832 ***************** *Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance. * Verna Myers, author and speaker -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danc at uw.edu Thu Jun 22 14:17:27 2023 From: danc at uw.edu (Dan Comden) Date: Thu Jun 22 14:17:58 2023 Subject: [Athen] Flip Cards in Canvas In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Can't speak to the accessibility of this specific Canvas widget, but keyboard testing is something most anyone can do. Check out nomouse.org for more details. Make sure the same functionality for mouse users is present for keyboard-only folks. -*- Dan On Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 1:08?PM Heather Mariger < heather.mariger@chemeketa.edu> wrote: > Greetings, > > I apologize for the cross posting (I need all the help I can get)... > > I have a faculty member who wants to use flip cards in Canvas. He > found this article: Create CSS Flip cards in Canvas > > > > While I have a *very* basic understanding of CSS and HTML, I am in no way > qualified to determine if this technique is fully keyboard accessible (I > rather suspect not). > > So, I am reaching out to you brilliant people to ask if these > instructions are actually accessible or if you know of a way to make > accessible flip cards in Canvas. > > Thanks so much! > H. > > > > > *Heather Mariger* > *Digital Accessibility Advocate* > > *Pronouns: She/Her* > > *Center for Academic Innovation* > *Chemeketa Community College* > *4000 Lancaster Drive NE - 9/126A* > *Salem, OR 97305* > > 503.589.7832 > > ***************** > *Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to > dance. * > Verna Myers, author and speaker > > > > _______________________________________________ > athen-list mailing list > athen-list@mailman12.u.washington.edu > http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/athen-list > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkramer at ahead.org Fri Jun 23 16:29:19 2023 From: hkramer at ahead.org (Howard Kramer) Date: Fri Jun 23 16:30:00 2023 Subject: [Athen] April 28 is the last day to submit 2nd-Round proposals for Accessing Higher Ground 2023 Message-ID: *Accessing Higher Ground: Accessible Media, Web & Technology Conference ? November 6 ? 10, 2023* 2nd-Round Proposal Deadline: April 28 Besides 1 and 2-hr main conference sessions, we are also looking for 3-hr or 6-hr pre-conference proposals. (6-hr pre-con speakers receive a waiver of conference fees. Contact the conference organizer for more details). The following range of topics, for the pre- or main conference are of particular interest: ? Braille/Blindness ? Library Collaborations ? Professional Development ? Assistive Technology ? Universal Design for Learning ? Artificial Intelligence ? Captioning Use the online speaker proposal form to submit your proposal. Additional speaker information can be found on the AHG website . Discounts: ? Out of state speakers receive a 10% discount on registration ? ATHEN and AHEAD members receive an additional discount ? Pre-con speakers receive 50% discount for 3-hr sessions and 100% waiver for full-day workshops View last year?s sessions to get a sense of the typical agenda and range of topics. If you have any questions about proposal submission, contact Howard Kramer at 720-351-8668 or at the email below. e-mail: ahg@ahead.org Conference URL: http://accessinghigherground.org/ -- Regards, Howard Howard Kramer AHG Conference Director Accessing Higher Ground cell: 720-351-8668 Sign up to access the recordings from the *2022 Accessing Higher Ground Conference .* Sign up to our mailing list to receive announcements . Complete program information and registration is open for AHEAD's full line-up of Spring 2023 webinars . Not yet a member of AHEAD? *We welcome you to join AHEAD now. * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkramer at ahead.org Fri Jun 23 17:06:50 2023 From: hkramer at ahead.org (Howard Kramer) Date: Fri Jun 23 17:07:31 2023 Subject: [Athen] Corrected due date: June 28 is the last day to submit 2nd-Round proposals for Accessing Higher Ground 2023 Message-ID: *Accessing Higher Ground: Accessible Media, Web & Technology Conference ? November 6 ? 10, 2023* 2nd-Round Proposal Deadline: June 28 Besides 1 and 2-hr main conference sessions, we are also looking for 3-hr or 6-hr pre-conference proposals. (6-hr pre-con speakers receive a waiver of conference fees. Contact the conference organizer for more details). The following range of topics, for the pre- or main conference are of particular interest: ? Braille/Blindness ? Library Collaborations ? Professional Development ? Assistive Technology ? Universal Design for Learning ? Artificial Intelligence ? Captioning Use the online speaker proposal form to submit your proposal. Additional speaker information can be found on the AHG website . Discounts: ? Out of state speakers receive a 10% discount on registration ? ATHEN and AHEAD members receive an additional discount ? Pre-con speakers receive 50% discount for 3-hr sessions and 100% waiver for full-day workshops View last year?s sessions to get a sense of the typical agenda and range of topics. If you have any questions about proposal submission, contact Howard Kramer at 720-351-8668 or at the email below. e-mail: ahg@ahead.org Conference URL: http://accessinghigherground.org/ -- Regards, Howard Howard Kramer AHG Conference Director Accessing Higher Ground cell: 720-351-8668 Sign up to access the recordings from the *2022 Accessing Higher Ground Conference .* Sign up to our mailing list to receive announcements . Complete program information and registration is open for AHEAD's full line-up of Spring 2023 webinars . Not yet a member of AHEAD? *We welcome you to join AHEAD now. * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foreigntype at gmail.com Fri Jun 23 19:55:05 2023 From: foreigntype at gmail.com (foreigntype@gmail.com) Date: Fri Jun 23 19:55:21 2023 Subject: [Athen] Corrected due date: June 28 is the last day to submit 2nd-Round proposals for Accessing Higher Ground 2023 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Howard, Do you recommend we resubmit the AT proposal with a shorter (3hr) time slot for the pre-conference or redo it and submit a new one? I?m pretty confident Leyna and I can manage the material in a 3 hr. slot with a regular scheduled session rather than request a double session during the main conference. Will be glad to do it either way. Let me know!! Wink On Fri, Jun 23, 2023 at 5:07 PM Howard Kramer wrote: > *Accessing Higher Ground: Accessible Media, Web & Technology Conference ? > November 6 ? 10, 2023* > > 2nd-Round Proposal Deadline: June 28 > > Besides 1 and 2-hr main conference sessions, we are also looking for 3-hr > or 6-hr pre-conference proposals. (6-hr pre-con speakers receive a waiver > of conference fees. Contact the conference organizer for > more details). > > > > The following range of topics, for the pre- or main conference are of > particular interest: > > > > ? Braille/Blindness > > ? Library Collaborations > > ? Professional Development > > ? Assistive Technology > > ? Universal Design for Learning > > ? Artificial Intelligence > > ? Captioning > > Use the online speaker proposal form > to submit your > proposal. Additional speaker information can be found on the AHG website > . > > Discounts: > > ? Out of state speakers receive a 10% discount on registration > > ? ATHEN and AHEAD members receive an additional discount > > ? Pre-con speakers receive 50% discount for 3-hr sessions and 100% > waiver for full-day workshops > > View last year?s sessions > to get a > sense of the typical agenda and range of topics. > > If you have any questions about proposal submission, contact Howard Kramer > at 720-351-8668 or at the email below. > > e-mail: ahg@ahead.org > > Conference URL: http://accessinghigherground.org/ > > -- > Regards, > Howard > > Howard Kramer > AHG Conference Director > Accessing Higher Ground > cell: 720-351-8668 > > Sign up to access the recordings from the *2022 Accessing Higher > Ground Conference > .* > > > Sign up to our mailing list to receive announcements > . > > > > Complete program information and registration is open for AHEAD's full > line-up of Spring 2023 webinars > . > > > > Not yet a member of AHEAD? *We welcome you to join AHEAD now. > * > _______________________________________________ > athen-list mailing list > athen-list@mailman12.u.washington.edu > http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/athen-list > -- Wink Harner Assistive Technology Consulting and Training Alternative Text Production Portland OR. foreigntype@gmail.com 480-984-0034 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From heather.mariger at chemeketa.edu Tue Jun 27 13:52:18 2023 From: heather.mariger at chemeketa.edu (Heather Mariger) Date: Tue Jun 27 13:52:32 2023 Subject: [Athen] Flip Cards in Canvas In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Thanks everyone for your help with trying to figure out flash cards in Canvas. I really appreciate being part of these great communities. I learn more from reading these posts than I did in school. Thanks, H. *Heather Mariger* *Digital Accessibility Advocate* *Pronouns: She/Her* *Center for Academic Innovation* *Chemeketa Community College* *4000 Lancaster Drive NE - 9/126A* *Salem, OR 97305* 503.589.7832 ***************** *Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance. * Verna Myers, author and speaker On Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 1:06?PM Heather Mariger < heather.mariger@chemeketa.edu> wrote: > Greetings, > > I apologize for the cross posting (I need all the help I can get)... > > I have a faculty member who wants to use flip cards in Canvas. He > found this article: Create CSS Flip cards in Canvas > > > While I have a *very* basic understanding of CSS and HTML, I am in no way > qualified to determine if this technique is fully keyboard accessible (I > rather suspect not). > > So, I am reaching out to you brilliant people to ask if these > instructions are actually accessible or if you know of a way to make > accessible flip cards in Canvas. > > Thanks so much! > H. > > > > > *Heather Mariger* > *Digital Accessibility Advocate* > > *Pronouns: She/Her* > > *Center for Academic Innovation* > *Chemeketa Community College* > *4000 Lancaster Drive NE - 9/126A* > *Salem, OR 97305* > > 503.589.7832 > > ***************** > *Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to > dance. * > Verna Myers, author and speaker > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lydia at autistichoya.com Thu Jun 29 10:00:58 2023 From: lydia at autistichoya.com (Lydia X. Z. Brown) Date: Thu Jun 29 10:01:40 2023 Subject: [Athen] Seattle WA (US): University of Washington hiring Director of Strategy & Operations, Center for Research & Education on Accessible Technology & Experiences (CREATE) Message-ID: Just the messenger: The University of Washington?s Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE) seeks a Director of Strategy and Operations to join our team as a key leader to help steward this new multidisciplinary institute that involves faculty from multiple units across campus. *Please share this announcement with your accessibility, disability, mobility, technology, and health communities!* The Director of Strategy and Operations will have the overall responsibility of developing and overseeing organizational strategy, designing and implementing a diverse array of programs, enabling the successful execution of center operations, and helping to ensure a sustainable trajectory of high quality work in service of the Center?s core mission, which is 'To make technology accessible and to make the world accessible through technology.' CREATE is a multidisciplinary center that involves faculty from multiple units across campus. ? [image: LEARN MORE / APPLY] ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 1139 bytes Desc: not available URL: From am2621 at hunter.cuny.edu Thu Jun 29 11:22:54 2023 From: am2621 at hunter.cuny.edu (Adina Mulliken) Date: Thu Jun 29 11:23:02 2023 Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? Message-ID: Hi all, Apologies for the cross posting. I?m wondering if anyone could advise me what success criteria or techniques within WCAG you think could most clearly be interpreted to authorize ?removing? repetitive headers and footers from PDFs? I?m aiming to find the most specific criterion or ?technique? or ?failure? that I can. Maybe 2.4.1 Bypass blocks? Or Info and Relationships? If nothing else, I suppose this could fall under POUR principles. Or anything within PDF/UA or any other standards you know of? Maybe this sentence that I found in PDF/UA: ?Artifacts shall be marked as such and shall not be tagged in the structure tree.?? I would also appreciate opinions from any of you all in the accessibility community saying whether you think it?s important to remove repetitive headers and footers that interrupt the flow of text, as that could be helpful for me. I want to see if I can justify erring on the accessibility side of a possible conflict between copyright/licensing versus accessibility. (This is a situation where exceptions to copyright for people with disabilities wouldn?t apply.) Please respond to me directly if you prefer. Thank you! Adina Adina Mulliken Associate Professor, Librarian Silberman Social Work and Urban Public Health Library Hunter College, City University of New York 2180 3rd Ave. New York, NY Phone 212-396-7665 Pronouns she/her -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From K4mccall at outlook.com Thu Jun 29 11:40:51 2023 From: K4mccall at outlook.com (Karen McCall) Date: Thu Jun 29 11:40:55 2023 Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Page headers and footers are considered ?non-printing elements? in PDFs. They are not tagged by default. If you want to add ?page numbers? use the Page Labels technique as per ISO 14289 or PDF/UA. You don?t tag page numbers in PDFs or add tags for page headers or footers. Consider the accessibility barriers of: 1. Where do you add the page header or footer tags when a paragraph, list, or table spans multiple pages? Do you interrupt the content to add/force people with disabilities to read information that people reading the content visually skip over? 2. Do you put the page header and footer information together in a clump before a multi-page list, table or paragraph or after it? Would it make sense to hear repeated information that appears on every page? We?ve never tagged page header and footer information as part of making PDFs accessible. I know some people have tagged page numbers but you end up with the dilemma I outlined above. Page Labels do give you the opportunity to have preface pages like i, ii, iii and so forth identified for everyone. Using Page Labels, someone using a screen reader can quickly go to a specific page but someone not using a screen reader can use the same keyboard commands/tool to go to page and land on the right page. If the page numbers are in the tags tree, they don?t always line up with the physical page and the page referenced when you try to go to a specific page. If a logo or organizational name is in a page header or footer, it also needs to be on the cover page of the document somewhere as text to acknowledge that this is an official document by that organization. And you never only put the title of the document in a page header or footer. If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact me! Cheers, Karen, From: athen-list On Behalf Of Adina Mulliken Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2023 2:23 PM To: athen-list@u.washington.edu; EDUCAUSE-ITACCESS@ConnectedCommunity.org Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? Hi all, Apologies for the cross posting. I?m wondering if anyone could advise me what success criteria or techniques within WCAG you think could most clearly be interpreted to authorize ?removing? repetitive headers and footers from PDFs? I?m aiming to find the most specific criterion or ?technique? or ?failure? that I can. Maybe 2.4.1 Bypass blocks? Or Info and Relationships? If nothing else, I suppose this could fall under POUR principles. Or anything within PDF/UA or any other standards you know of? Maybe this sentence that I found in PDF/UA: ?Artifacts shall be marked as such and shall not be tagged in the structure tree.?? I would also appreciate opinions from any of you all in the accessibility community saying whether you think it?s important to remove repetitive headers and footers that interrupt the flow of text, as that could be helpful for me. I want to see if I can justify erring on the accessibility side of a possible conflict between copyright/licensing versus accessibility. (This is a situation where exceptions to copyright for people with disabilities wouldn?t apply.) Please respond to me directly if you prefer. Thank you! Adina Adina Mulliken Associate Professor, Librarian Silberman Social Work and Urban Public Health Library Hunter College, City University of New York 2180 3rd Ave. New York, NY Phone 212-396-7665 Pronouns she/her -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From chagnon at pubcom.com Thu Jun 29 12:35:52 2023 From: chagnon at pubcom.com (chagnon@pubcom.com) Date: Thu Jun 29 12:35:57 2023 Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Thanks, Karen! And this is why WCAG can't be used to judge the accessibility of PDFs. Another reason is that only the ISO's PDF committees can determine the tag set used for PDFs. PDF tags are different from HTML tags; some are the same, some slightly different, and others are unique only the PDFs not websites. On 2023-06-29 14:40, Karen McCall wrote: > Page headers and footers are considered ?non-printing elements? in > PDFs. They are not tagged by default. > > If you want to add ?page numbers? use the Page Labels technique as > per ISO 14289 or PDF/UA. > > You don?t tag page numbers in PDFs or add tags for page headers or > footers. > > Consider the accessibility barriers of: > > * Where do you add the page header or footer tags when a paragraph, > list, or table spans multiple pages? Do you interrupt the content to > add/force people with disabilities to read information that people > reading the content visually skip over? > * Do you put the page header and footer information together in a > clump before a multi-page list, table or paragraph or after it? Would > it make sense to hear repeated information that appears on every page? > > We?ve never tagged page header and footer information as part of > making PDFs accessible. I know some people have tagged page numbers > but you end up with the dilemma I outlined above. > > Page Labels do give you the opportunity to have preface pages like i, > ii, iii and so forth identified for everyone. Using Page Labels, > someone using a screen reader can quickly go to a specific page but > someone not using a screen reader can use the same keyboard > commands/tool to go to page and land on the right page. If the page > numbers are in the tags tree, they don?t always line up with the > physical page and the page referenced when you try to go to a specific > page. > > If a logo or organizational name is in a page header or footer, it > also needs to be on the cover page of the document somewhere as text > to acknowledge that this is an official document by that organization. > And you never only put the title of the document in a page header or > footer. > > If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact me! > > Cheers, Karen, > > From: athen-list On > Behalf Of Adina Mulliken > Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2023 2:23 PM > To: athen-list@u.washington.edu; > EDUCAUSE-ITACCESS@ConnectedCommunity.org > Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running > headers and footers from PDFs? > > Hi all, > > Apologies for the cross posting. > > I?m wondering if anyone could advise me what success criteria or > techniques within WCAG you think could most clearly be interpreted to > authorize ?removing? repetitive headers and footers from PDFs? > I?m aiming to find the most specific criterion or ?technique? or > ?failure? that I can. Maybe 2.4.1 Bypass blocks? Or Info and > Relationships? If nothing else, I suppose this could fall under POUR > principles. Or anything within PDF/UA or any other standards you know > of? Maybe this sentence that I found in PDF/UA: ?Artifacts shall be > marked as such and shall not be tagged in the structure tree.?? > > I would also appreciate opinions from any of you all in the > accessibility community saying whether you think it?s important to > remove repetitive headers and footers that interrupt the flow of text, > as that could be helpful for me. > > I want to see if I can justify erring on the accessibility side of a > possible conflict between copyright/licensing versus accessibility. > (This is a situation where exceptions to copyright for people with > disabilities wouldn?t apply.) > > Please respond to me directly if you prefer. > > Thank you! > > Adina > > Adina Mulliken > > Associate Professor, Librarian Silberman Social Work and Urban Public > Health Library > > Hunter College, City University of New York > > 2180 3rd Ave. New York, NY > > Phone 212-396-7665 > > Pronouns she/her > _______________________________________________ > athen-list mailing list > athen-list@mailman12.u.washington.edu > http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/athen-list From chagnon at pubcom.com Thu Jun 29 12:51:45 2023 From: chagnon at pubcom.com (chagnon@pubcom.com) Date: Thu Jun 29 12:51:49 2023 Subject: [Athen] Adobe PDF Maker update: bug is fixed In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Pleased to let everyone know that Adobe has released a quick patch to correct the error in PDF Maker that left off Alt Text in PDFs exported from MS Word. Choose the patch for your version of Acrobat here: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/release-note/release-notes-acrobat-reader.html Look for version 23.003.20215 (June 21, 2023) For those affected by this bug, see this notice on the Adobe Community Forums. It's also where you can thank Adobe's engineering team for getting to the bug so quickly. (I know, they shouldn't have let the bug in from the start, but...) https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/new-bug-in-pdf-maker-removes-alt-text/td-p/13847277#M417723 Thanks to all who chimed in on the bug list! ?Bevi Chagnon | www.PubCom.com From am2621 at hunter.cuny.edu Thu Jun 29 12:58:55 2023 From: am2621 at hunter.cuny.edu (Adina Mulliken) Date: Thu Jun 29 12:59:21 2023 Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? Message-ID: HI Karen, Thank you for your detailed reply. Unfortunately, I have to admit I don't think I understood any of it, and I'm not even sure what to ask you to be able to clarify it. I know page numbers tend to be a huge problem. However, if you want to somehow try to clarify any more, maybe it would help to know I was trying to ask about the repetitive headers and footers and not the page numbers. Thanks again! Adina Message: 3 Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2023 18:40:51 +0000 From: Karen McCall > To: Access Technology Higher Education Network >, "EDUCAUSE-ITACCESS@ConnectedCommunity.org " > Subject: Re: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? Message-ID: > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Page headers and footers are considered ?non-printing elements? in PDFs. They are not tagged by default. If you want to add ?page numbers? use the Page Labels technique as per ISO 14289 or PDF/UA. You don?t tag page numbers in PDFs or add tags for page headers or footers. Consider the accessibility barriers of: 1. Where do you add the page header or footer tags when a paragraph, list, or table spans multiple pages? Do you interrupt the content to add/force people with disabilities to read information that people reading the content visually skip over? 2. Do you put the page header and footer information together in a clump before a multi-page list, table or paragraph or after it? Would it make sense to hear repeated information that appears on every page? We?ve never tagged page header and footer information as part of making PDFs accessible. I know some people have tagged page numbers but you end up with the dilemma I outlined above. Page Labels do give you the opportunity to have preface pages like i, ii, iii and so forth identified for everyone. Using Page Labels, someone using a screen reader can quickly go to a specific page but someone not using a screen reader can use the same keyboard commands/tool to go to page and land on the right page. If the page numbers are in the tags tree, they don?t always line up with the physical page and the page referenced when you try to go to a specific page. If a logo or organizational name is in a page header or footer, it also needs to be on the cover page of the document somewhere as text to acknowledge that this is an official document by that organization. And you never only put the title of the document in a page header or footer. If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact me! Cheers, Karen, From: athen-list > On Behalf Of Adina Mulliken Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2023 2:23 PM To: athen-list@u.washington.edu ; EDUCAUSE-ITACCESS@ConnectedCommunity.org Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? Hi all, Apologies for the cross posting. I?m wondering if anyone could advise me what success criteria or techniques within WCAG you think could most clearly be interpreted to authorize ?removing? repetitive headers and footers from PDFs? I?m aiming to find the most specific criterion or ?technique? or ?failure? that I can. Maybe 2.4.1 Bypass blocks? Or Info and Relationships? If nothing else, I suppose this could fall under POUR principles. Or anything within PDF/UA or any other standards you know of? Maybe this sentence that I found in PDF/UA: ?Artifacts shall be marked as such and shall not be tagged in the structure tree.?? I would also appreciate opinions from any of you all in the accessibility community saying whether you think it?s important to remove repetitive headers and footers that interrupt the flow of text, as that could be helpful for me. I want to see if I can justify erring on the accessibility side of a possible conflict between copyright/licensing versus accessibility. (This is a situation where exceptions to copyright for people with disabilities wouldn?t apply.) Please respond to me directly if you prefer. Thank you! Adina Adina Mulliken Associate Professor, Librarian Silberman Social Work and Urban Public Health Library Hunter College, City University of New York 2180 3rd Ave. New York, NY Phone 212-396-7665 Pronouns she/her From chagnon at pubcom.com Thu Jun 29 16:47:06 2023 From: chagnon at pubcom.com (chagnon@pubcom.com) Date: Thu Jun 29 16:47:28 2023 Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <008201d9aae4$03b2dfa0$0b189ee0$@pubcom.com> Clarifying about headers/footers in PDFs?apologies in advance because this is long and detailed. WCAG doesn?t address headers, footers, and page numbers correctly. And WCAG isn?t the right standard to reference for accessible PDFs. Instead, you?ll want to reference the PDF/UA-1, the current ISO standard (14289) for PDFs. You can purchase the standard directly from either the ISO in Geneva or the PDF Association, the designated and authorized manager of the ISO standard. * ISO?s website is https://www.iso.org/standard/64599.html * PDF Association?s is https://pdfa.org/resource/iso-14289-pdfua/#pdf-ua-1 Purchase button is in the upper right corner of the page. There?s also a freebie reference guide I recommend to our students and clients. Written by the working group that produces the PDF/UA standard itself, it provides very solid guidelines on how to use PDF/UA tags for accessible PDFs. The ?Syntax Guide? is free from the PDF Association at https://pdfa.org/resource/tagged-pdf-best-practice-guide-syntax/ Warning: it is written for programmers so read between the lines of code to see the actual tag structures. In it, you can reference Section 3.5 Artifacts, which discusses both headers/footers and repeating page numbers. In a nutshell, they all must be artifacted so that assistive technologies skip them to avoid interfering with the content stream, but they?re still visible on the page for sighted users. That?s what Karen McCall was saying in her previous post. Screen reader users don?t want to hear ?Chapter 3: The History of the 100 Years War page 123? in the middle of a sentence that begins at the bottom of a page and reflows to the top of the next page. And they don?t need to hear ?Chapter 3: The History of the 100 Years War page whatever? because they already know they?re in Chapter 3 and they can announce the specific page number they?re on any time they need to know it. The best way to artifact these elements is in the source document, not the exported PDF. * In Word, everything placed inside Word?s header and footer sections is automatically artifacted when the PDF is exported, so everything should be correct in the final PDF. Learn how to make an accessible Word document that exports to an accessible PDF. * In PowerPoint, certain items on the Slide Masters are automatically artifacted when the PDF is exported. Learn how to make an accessible PowerPoint slide deck that exports to an accessible PDF. * And in Adobe InDesign, all items placed on the Master/Parent pages is automatically artifacted. Additionally, individual objects (text frames and graphics) in the body of the page can be manually designated as artifacts, too. Learn how to make an InDesign layout that exports to an accessible PDF. When the tools in these authoring programs are used correctly, they will produce a compliant PDF that doesn?t need any remediation afterwards?well, for these items at least! However, if you?re stuck with a PDF and can?t get your fingers on the source file, then you can manually correct this in Acrobat: 1. Select the parent tag, such as

that holds the header/footer. 2. Expand the tag to expose the yellow content container inside the tag. 3. Right-click on the yellow content container and select Artifact. The yellow content container will now disappear from the tag tree. 4. It leaves behind a now empty

tag which can safely be deleted. But be careful: only truly empty tags can be deleted so make sure the

doesn?t have any content containers or the grey expansion arrow to its left. FYI, both myself and Karen McCall are on the ISO committees for PDF and PDF/UA. There are over 50 specifications for different types of PDF files and their usages, and we?re both on a smattering of them, as well. Both of us were on the first WCAG teams that created the original accessibility standards. And personally, I?ve been a traditional programmer, PDF programmer, web developer, and digital media developer. A website?s code is exceptionally simple compared to at PDF?s code. The code structure of the two are extremely different, and there are differences between what a webpage presents as content from what a Word/PDF document presents. Like headers and footers and page numbers and text content that reflows from page to page, column to column. Know all of the standards and understand which one to use for different types of content. We have recent blogs on this at: * Accessibility Standards: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/standards/wcag-pdf/index.shtml * US Laws for Accessibility: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/us-laws/all/index.shtml * PDF/UA tag set: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/2020_05-02_tags/pdf-ua-tags.shtml Hope this helps everyone make accessible PDFs as quickly and painlessly as possible. -- Bevi Chagnon ? ? ? Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | Chagnon@PubCom.com US Delegate to the ISO Committees for PDF and PDF/UA Accessibility ? ? ? PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing consulting ? training ? development ? design ? sec. 508 services Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes ? ? ? Latest blog-tutorial ? The 4 Reading Orders in PDFs From: athen-list On Behalf Of Adina Mulliken Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2023 2:23 PM To: athen-list@u.washington.edu; EDUCAUSE-ITACCESS@ConnectedCommunity.org Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? Hi all, Apologies for the cross posting. I?m wondering if anyone could advise me what success criteria or techniques within WCAG you think could most clearly be interpreted to authorize ?removing? repetitive headers and footers from PDFs? I?m aiming to find the most specific criterion or ?technique? or ?failure? that I can. Maybe 2.4.1 Bypass blocks? Or Info and Relationships? If nothing else, I suppose this could fall under POUR principles. Or anything within PDF/UA or any other standards you know of? Maybe this sentence that I found in PDF/UA: ?Artifacts shall be marked as such and shall not be tagged in the structure tree.?? I would also appreciate opinions from any of you all in the accessibility community saying whether you think it?s important to remove repetitive headers and footers that interrupt the flow of text, as that could be helpful for me. I want to see if I can justify erring on the accessibility side of a possible conflict between copyright/licensing versus accessibility. (This is a situation where exceptions to copyright for people with disabilities wouldn?t apply.) Please respond to me directly if you prefer. Thank you! Adina Adina Mulliken Associate Professor, Librarian Silberman Social Work and Urban Public Health Library Hunter College, City University of New York 2180 3rd Ave. New York, NY Phone 212-396-7665 Pronouns she/her -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From chagnon at pubcom.com Thu Jun 29 17:16:50 2023 From: chagnon at pubcom.com (chagnon@pubcom.com) Date: Thu Jun 29 17:16:56 2023 Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? In-Reply-To: <008201d9aae4$03b2dfa0$0b189ee0$@pubcom.com> References: <008201d9aae4$03b2dfa0$0b189ee0$@pubcom.com> Message-ID: <00b301d9aae8$2ac812f0$805838d0$@pubcom.com> I missed commenting about Adina?s last portion of her post regarding copyright info. I assume she means the copyright info that usually is in the footer of a page-based document file like Word and PDF. Usually this gets automatically artifacted following what I described earlier in Word, PowerPoint, and Adobe InDesign. But it?s critical information for everyone and must be available to all A T users. Well, available once, not on every single freaking page! The desired end result: have the copyright info only once in the content stream, and artifact it everywhere else. As before, the best place to do this is in the original source document: in Word, PowerPoint, and Adobe InDesign, make sure one copy is live text on the first or early page of the document, and have all the other instances artifacted by being either in the header/footer sections, on a slide master page, or on an InDesign parent/master page. The PDFs will export correctly. But if you?re stuck with only the final PDF, then use your Acrobat tools to ?rescue? the first artifacted instance of the copyright info and weave it into a logical place in the tag tree. >From the Order Panel, use the Reading Order Tools to select the copyright text and tag it as

. Then, from the Tags panel, slide the tag into a good logical position. A broad interpretation of the PDF/UA standard (not formally in the standard, but rather a general guideline/best practice) is that repetitive information should be artifacted, but it?s allowed in the main content stream at least once when needed. Copyright info, security disclaimers, ownership logos, date stamps, and other critical information must be available to A T for the first instance, but is considered repetitive from the second instance going forward and should be artifacted from that point on. Hope this helps answer your question. ? ? ? Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | Chagnon@PubCom.com ? ? ? PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing consulting ? training ? development ? design ? sec. 508 services Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes ? ? ? Latest blog-newsletter ? Simple Guide to Writing Alt-Text From: athen-list On Behalf Of chagnon@pubcom.com Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2023 7:47 PM To: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network' ; EDUCAUSE-ITACCESS@ConnectedCommunity.org Subject: Re: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? Clarifying about headers/footers in PDFs?apologies in advance because this is long and detailed. WCAG doesn?t address headers, footers, and page numbers correctly. And WCAG isn?t the right standard to reference for accessible PDFs. Instead, you?ll want to reference the PDF/UA-1, the current ISO standard (14289) for PDFs. You can purchase the standard directly from either the ISO in Geneva or the PDF Association, the designated and authorized manager of the ISO standard. * ISO?s website is https://www.iso.org/standard/64599.html * PDF Association?s is https://pdfa.org/resource/iso-14289-pdfua/#pdf-ua-1 Purchase button is in the upper right corner of the page. There?s also a freebie reference guide I recommend to our students and clients. Written by the working group that produces the PDF/UA standard itself, it provides very solid guidelines on how to use PDF/UA tags for accessible PDFs. The ?Syntax Guide? is free from the PDF Association at https://pdfa.org/resource/tagged-pdf-best-practice-guide-syntax/ Warning: it is written for programmers so read between the lines of code to see the actual tag structures. In it, you can reference Section 3.5 Artifacts, which discusses both headers/footers and repeating page numbers. In a nutshell, they all must be artifacted so that assistive technologies skip them to avoid interfering with the content stream, but they?re still visible on the page for sighted users. That?s what Karen McCall was saying in her previous post. Screen reader users don?t want to hear ?Chapter 3: The History of the 100 Years War page 123? in the middle of a sentence that begins at the bottom of a page and reflows to the top of the next page. And they don?t need to hear ?Chapter 3: The History of the 100 Years War page whatever? because they already know they?re in Chapter 3 and they can announce the specific page number they?re on any time they need to know it. The best way to artifact these elements is in the source document, not the exported PDF. * In Word, everything placed inside Word?s header and footer sections is automatically artifacted when the PDF is exported, so everything should be correct in the final PDF. Learn how to make an accessible Word document that exports to an accessible PDF. * In PowerPoint, certain items on the Slide Masters are automatically artifacted when the PDF is exported. Learn how to make an accessible PowerPoint slide deck that exports to an accessible PDF. * And in Adobe InDesign, all items placed on the Master/Parent pages is automatically artifacted. Additionally, individual objects (text frames and graphics) in the body of the page can be manually designated as artifacts, too. Learn how to make an InDesign layout that exports to an accessible PDF. When the tools in these authoring programs are used correctly, they will produce a compliant PDF that doesn?t need any remediation afterwards?well, for these items at least! However, if you?re stuck with a PDF and can?t get your fingers on the source file, then you can manually correct this in Acrobat: 1. Select the parent tag, such as

that holds the header/footer. 2. Expand the tag to expose the yellow content container inside the tag. 3. Right-click on the yellow content container and select Artifact. The yellow content container will now disappear from the tag tree. 4. It leaves behind a now empty

tag which can safely be deleted. But be careful: only truly empty tags can be deleted so make sure the

doesn?t have any content containers or the grey expansion arrow to its left. FYI, both myself and Karen McCall are on the ISO committees for PDF and PDF/UA. There are over 50 specifications for different types of PDF files and their usages, and we?re both on a smattering of them, as well. Both of us were on the first WCAG teams that created the original accessibility standards. And personally, I?ve been a traditional programmer, PDF programmer, web developer, and digital media developer. A website?s code is exceptionally simple compared to at PDF?s code. The code structure of the two are extremely different, and there are differences between what a webpage presents as content from what a Word/PDF document presents. Like headers and footers and page numbers and text content that reflows from page to page, column to column. Know all of the standards and understand which one to use for different types of content. We have recent blogs on this at: * Accessibility Standards: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/standards/wcag-pdf/index.shtml * US Laws for Accessibility: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/us-laws/all/index.shtml * PDF/UA tag set: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/2020_05-02_tags/pdf-ua-tags.shtml Hope this helps everyone make accessible PDFs as quickly and painlessly as possible. -- Bevi Chagnon ? ? ? Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | Chagnon@PubCom.com US Delegate to the ISO Committees for PDF and PDF/UA Accessibility ? ? ? PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing consulting ? training ? development ? design ? sec. 508 services Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/ classes ? ? ? Latest blog-tutorial ? The 4 Reading Orders in PDFs From: athen-list > On Behalf Of Adina Mulliken Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2023 2:23 PM To: athen-list@u.washington.edu ; EDUCAUSE-ITACCESS@ConnectedCommunity.org Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? Hi all, Apologies for the cross posting. I?m wondering if anyone could advise me what success criteria or techniques within WCAG you think could most clearly be interpreted to authorize ?removing? repetitive headers and footers from PDFs? I?m aiming to find the most specific criterion or ?technique? or ?failure? that I can. Maybe 2.4.1 Bypass blocks? Or Info and Relationships? If nothing else, I suppose this could fall under POUR principles. Or anything within PDF/UA or any other standards you know of? Maybe this sentence that I found in PDF/UA: ?Artifacts shall be marked as such and shall not be tagged in the structure tree.?? I would also appreciate opinions from any of you all in the accessibility community saying whether you think it?s important to remove repetitive headers and footers that interrupt the flow of text, as that could be helpful for me. I want to see if I can justify erring on the accessibility side of a possible conflict between copyright/licensing versus accessibility. (This is a situation where exceptions to copyright for people with disabilities wouldn?t apply.) Please respond to me directly if you prefer. Thank you! Adina Adina Mulliken Associate Professor, Librarian Silberman Social Work and Urban Public Health Library Hunter College, City University of New York 2180 3rd Ave. New York, NY Phone 212-396-7665 Pronouns she/her -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From K4mccall at outlook.com Fri Jun 30 02:57:21 2023 From: K4mccall at outlook.com (Karen McCall) Date: Fri Jun 30 02:57:27 2023 Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? In-Reply-To: <008201d9aae4$03b2dfa0$0b189ee0$@pubcom.com> References: <008201d9aae4$03b2dfa0$0b189ee0$@pubcom.com> Message-ID: Thanks Bevi! I'd left work when Adina's post came in and was going to reply this morning. If anyone needs more clarification, let me know on or off list. Cheers, Karen From: athen-list On Behalf Of chagnon@pubcom.com Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2023 7:47 PM To: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network' ; EDUCAUSE-ITACCESS@ConnectedCommunity.org Subject: Re: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? Clarifying about headers/footers in PDFs...apologies in advance because this is long and detailed. WCAG doesn't address headers, footers, and page numbers correctly. And WCAG isn't the right standard to reference for accessible PDFs. Instead, you'll want to reference the PDF/UA-1, the current ISO standard (14289) for PDFs. You can purchase the standard directly from either the ISO in Geneva or the PDF Association, the designated and authorized manager of the ISO standard. * ISO's website is https://www.iso.org/standard/64599.html * PDF Association's is https://pdfa.org/resource/iso-14289-pdfua/#pdf-ua-1 Purchase button is in the upper right corner of the page. There's also a freebie reference guide I recommend to our students and clients. Written by the working group that produces the PDF/UA standard itself, it provides very solid guidelines on how to use PDF/UA tags for accessible PDFs. The "Syntax Guide" is free from the PDF Association at https://pdfa.org/resource/tagged-pdf-best-practice-guide-syntax/ Warning: it is written for programmers so read between the lines of code to see the actual tag structures. In it, you can reference Section 3.5 Artifacts, which discusses both headers/footers and repeating page numbers. In a nutshell, they all must be artifacted so that assistive technologies skip them to avoid interfering with the content stream, but they're still visible on the page for sighted users. That's what Karen McCall was saying in her previous post. Screen reader users don't want to hear "Chapter 3: The History of the 100 Years War page 123" in the middle of a sentence that begins at the bottom of a page and reflows to the top of the next page. And they don't need to hear "Chapter 3: The History of the 100 Years War page whatever" because they already know they're in Chapter 3 and they can announce the specific page number they're on any time they need to know it. The best way to artifact these elements is in the source document, not the exported PDF. * In Word, everything placed inside Word's header and footer sections is automatically artifacted when the PDF is exported, so everything should be correct in the final PDF. Learn how to make an accessible Word document that exports to an accessible PDF. * In PowerPoint, certain items on the Slide Masters are automatically artifacted when the PDF is exported. Learn how to make an accessible PowerPoint slide deck that exports to an accessible PDF. * And in Adobe InDesign, all items placed on the Master/Parent pages is automatically artifacted. Additionally, individual objects (text frames and graphics) in the body of the page can be manually designated as artifacts, too. Learn how to make an InDesign layout that exports to an accessible PDF. When the tools in these authoring programs are used correctly, they will produce a compliant PDF that doesn't need any remediation afterwards...well, for these items at least! However, if you're stuck with a PDF and can't get your fingers on the source file, then you can manually correct this in Acrobat: 1. Select the parent tag, such as

that holds the header/footer. 2. Expand the tag to expose the yellow content container inside the tag. 3. Right-click on the yellow content container and select Artifact. The yellow content container will now disappear from the tag tree. 4. It leaves behind a now empty

tag which can safely be deleted. But be careful: only truly empty tags can be deleted so make sure the

doesn't have any content containers or the grey expansion arrow to its left. FYI, both myself and Karen McCall are on the ISO committees for PDF and PDF/UA. There are over 50 specifications for different types of PDF files and their usages, and we're both on a smattering of them, as well. Both of us were on the first WCAG teams that created the original accessibility standards. And personally, I've been a traditional programmer, PDF programmer, web developer, and digital media developer. A website's code is exceptionally simple compared to at PDF's code. The code structure of the two are extremely different, and there are differences between what a webpage presents as content from what a Word/PDF document presents. Like headers and footers and page numbers and text content that reflows from page to page, column to column. Know all of the standards and understand which one to use for different types of content. We have recent blogs on this at: * Accessibility Standards: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/standards/wcag-pdf/index.shtml * US Laws for Accessibility: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/us-laws/all/index.shtml * PDF/UA tag set: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/2020_05-02_tags/pdf-ua-tags.shtml Hope this helps everyone make accessible PDFs as quickly and painlessly as possible. -- Bevi Chagnon - - - Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | Chagnon@PubCom.com US Delegate to the ISO Committees for PDF and PDF/UA Accessibility - - - PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing consulting * training * development * design * sec. 508 services Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes - - - Latest blog-tutorial - The 4 Reading Orders in PDFs From: athen-list > On Behalf Of Adina Mulliken Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2023 2:23 PM To: athen-list@u.washington.edu; EDUCAUSE-ITACCESS@ConnectedCommunity.org Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? Hi all, Apologies for the cross posting. I'm wondering if anyone could advise me what success criteria or techniques within WCAG you think could most clearly be interpreted to authorize "removing" repetitive headers and footers from PDFs? I'm aiming to find the most specific criterion or "technique" or "failure" that I can. Maybe 2.4.1 Bypass blocks? Or Info and Relationships? If nothing else, I suppose this could fall under POUR principles. Or anything within PDF/UA or any other standards you know of? Maybe this sentence that I found in PDF/UA: "Artifacts shall be marked as such and shall not be tagged in the structure tree."? I would also appreciate opinions from any of you all in the accessibility community saying whether you think it's important to remove repetitive headers and footers that interrupt the flow of text, as that could be helpful for me. I want to see if I can justify erring on the accessibility side of a possible conflict between copyright/licensing versus accessibility. (This is a situation where exceptions to copyright for people with disabilities wouldn't apply.) Please respond to me directly if you prefer. Thank you! Adina Adina Mulliken Associate Professor, Librarian Silberman Social Work and Urban Public Health Library Hunter College, City University of New York 2180 3rd Ave. New York, NY Phone 212-396-7665 Pronouns she/her -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From K4mccall at outlook.com Fri Jun 30 03:01:25 2023 From: K4mccall at outlook.com (Karen McCall) Date: Fri Jun 30 03:01:31 2023 Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? In-Reply-To: <00b301d9aae8$2ac812f0$805838d0$@pubcom.com> References: <008201d9aae4$03b2dfa0$0b189ee0$@pubcom.com> <00b301d9aae8$2ac812f0$805838d0$@pubcom.com> Message-ID: This is also true for any documents with watermarks that contain essential information such as "draft", "confidential", or "do not copy". This text must be on the cover page (at least) to let those of us using adaptive technology that this special "instruction" is part of the document. We just need to know this once, at the beginning of the document, not on every page. It can be part of the filename but it is easy to edit filenames so ensuring that copyright or watermark information is also in the document itself is important. Decorative watermarks don't need to be identified, but they do need to be faint enough so that they don't interfere with someone visually reading the content. Cheers, Karen From: athen-list On Behalf Of chagnon@pubcom.com Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2023 8:17 PM To: chagnon@pubcom.com; 'Access Technology Higher Education Network' ; EDUCAUSE-ITACCESS@ConnectedCommunity.org Subject: Re: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? I missed commenting about Adina's last portion of her post regarding copyright info. I assume she means the copyright info that usually is in the footer of a page-based document file like Word and PDF. Usually this gets automatically artifacted following what I described earlier in Word, PowerPoint, and Adobe InDesign. But it's critical information for everyone and must be available to all A T users. Well, available once, not on every single freaking page! The desired end result: have the copyright info only once in the content stream, and artifact it everywhere else. As before, the best place to do this is in the original source document: in Word, PowerPoint, and Adobe InDesign, make sure one copy is live text on the first or early page of the document, and have all the other instances artifacted by being either in the header/footer sections, on a slide master page, or on an InDesign parent/master page. The PDFs will export correctly. But if you're stuck with only the final PDF, then use your Acrobat tools to "rescue" the first artifacted instance of the copyright info and weave it into a logical place in the tag tree. From the Order Panel, use the Reading Order Tools to select the copyright text and tag it as

. Then, from the Tags panel, slide the tag into a good logical position. A broad interpretation of the PDF/UA standard (not formally in the standard, but rather a general guideline/best practice) is that repetitive information should be artifacted, but it's allowed in the main content stream at least once when needed. Copyright info, security disclaimers, ownership logos, date stamps, and other critical information must be available to A T for the first instance, but is considered repetitive from the second instance going forward and should be artifacted from that point on. Hope this helps answer your question. - - - Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | Chagnon@PubCom.com - - - PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing consulting * training * development * design * sec. 508 services Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes - - - Latest blog-newsletter - Simple Guide to Writing Alt-Text From: athen-list > On Behalf Of chagnon@pubcom.com Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2023 7:47 PM To: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network' >; EDUCAUSE-ITACCESS@ConnectedCommunity.org Subject: Re: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? Clarifying about headers/footers in PDFs...apologies in advance because this is long and detailed. WCAG doesn't address headers, footers, and page numbers correctly. And WCAG isn't the right standard to reference for accessible PDFs. Instead, you'll want to reference the PDF/UA-1, the current ISO standard (14289) for PDFs. You can purchase the standard directly from either the ISO in Geneva or the PDF Association, the designated and authorized manager of the ISO standard. * ISO's website is https://www.iso.org/standard/64599.html * PDF Association's is https://pdfa.org/resource/iso-14289-pdfua/#pdf-ua-1 Purchase button is in the upper right corner of the page. There's also a freebie reference guide I recommend to our students and clients. Written by the working group that produces the PDF/UA standard itself, it provides very solid guidelines on how to use PDF/UA tags for accessible PDFs. The "Syntax Guide" is free from the PDF Association at https://pdfa.org/resource/tagged-pdf-best-practice-guide-syntax/ Warning: it is written for programmers so read between the lines of code to see the actual tag structures. In it, you can reference Section 3.5 Artifacts, which discusses both headers/footers and repeating page numbers. In a nutshell, they all must be artifacted so that assistive technologies skip them to avoid interfering with the content stream, but they're still visible on the page for sighted users. That's what Karen McCall was saying in her previous post. Screen reader users don't want to hear "Chapter 3: The History of the 100 Years War page 123" in the middle of a sentence that begins at the bottom of a page and reflows to the top of the next page. And they don't need to hear "Chapter 3: The History of the 100 Years War page whatever" because they already know they're in Chapter 3 and they can announce the specific page number they're on any time they need to know it. The best way to artifact these elements is in the source document, not the exported PDF. * In Word, everything placed inside Word's header and footer sections is automatically artifacted when the PDF is exported, so everything should be correct in the final PDF. Learn how to make an accessible Word document that exports to an accessible PDF. * In PowerPoint, certain items on the Slide Masters are automatically artifacted when the PDF is exported. Learn how to make an accessible PowerPoint slide deck that exports to an accessible PDF. * And in Adobe InDesign, all items placed on the Master/Parent pages is automatically artifacted. Additionally, individual objects (text frames and graphics) in the body of the page can be manually designated as artifacts, too. Learn how to make an InDesign layout that exports to an accessible PDF. When the tools in these authoring programs are used correctly, they will produce a compliant PDF that doesn't need any remediation afterwards...well, for these items at least! However, if you're stuck with a PDF and can't get your fingers on the source file, then you can manually correct this in Acrobat: 1. Select the parent tag, such as

that holds the header/footer. 2. Expand the tag to expose the yellow content container inside the tag. 3. Right-click on the yellow content container and select Artifact. The yellow content container will now disappear from the tag tree. 4. It leaves behind a now empty

tag which can safely be deleted. But be careful: only truly empty tags can be deleted so make sure the

doesn't have any content containers or the grey expansion arrow to its left. FYI, both myself and Karen McCall are on the ISO committees for PDF and PDF/UA. There are over 50 specifications for different types of PDF files and their usages, and we're both on a smattering of them, as well. Both of us were on the first WCAG teams that created the original accessibility standards. And personally, I've been a traditional programmer, PDF programmer, web developer, and digital media developer. A website's code is exceptionally simple compared to at PDF's code. The code structure of the two are extremely different, and there are differences between what a webpage presents as content from what a Word/PDF document presents. Like headers and footers and page numbers and text content that reflows from page to page, column to column. Know all of the standards and understand which one to use for different types of content. We have recent blogs on this at: * Accessibility Standards: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/standards/wcag-pdf/index.shtml * US Laws for Accessibility: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/us-laws/all/index.shtml * PDF/UA tag set: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/2020_05-02_tags/pdf-ua-tags.shtml Hope this helps everyone make accessible PDFs as quickly and painlessly as possible. -- Bevi Chagnon - - - Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | Chagnon@PubCom.com US Delegate to the ISO Committees for PDF and PDF/UA Accessibility - - - PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing consulting * training * development * design * sec. 508 services Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes - - - Latest blog-tutorial - The 4 Reading Orders in PDFs From: athen-list > On Behalf Of Adina Mulliken Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2023 2:23 PM To: athen-list@u.washington.edu; EDUCAUSE-ITACCESS@ConnectedCommunity.org Subject: [Athen] How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? Hi all, Apologies for the cross posting. I'm wondering if anyone could advise me what success criteria or techniques within WCAG you think could most clearly be interpreted to authorize "removing" repetitive headers and footers from PDFs? I'm aiming to find the most specific criterion or "technique" or "failure" that I can. Maybe 2.4.1 Bypass blocks? Or Info and Relationships? If nothing else, I suppose this could fall under POUR principles. Or anything within PDF/UA or any other standards you know of? Maybe this sentence that I found in PDF/UA: "Artifacts shall be marked as such and shall not be tagged in the structure tree."? I would also appreciate opinions from any of you all in the accessibility community saying whether you think it's important to remove repetitive headers and footers that interrupt the flow of text, as that could be helpful for me. I want to see if I can justify erring on the accessibility side of a possible conflict between copyright/licensing versus accessibility. (This is a situation where exceptions to copyright for people with disabilities wouldn't apply.) Please respond to me directly if you prefer. Thank you! Adina Adina Mulliken Associate Professor, Librarian Silberman Social Work and Urban Public Health Library Hunter College, City University of New York 2180 3rd Ave. New York, NY Phone 212-396-7665 Pronouns she/her -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rbeach at KCKCC.EDU Fri Jun 30 10:21:45 2023 From: rbeach at KCKCC.EDU (Robert Beach) Date: Fri Jun 30 10:21:52 2023 Subject: [Athen] Vendor question Message-ID: Hi all, I apologize if you see this on more than one list. I'm trying to hit all of the moving targets. Our college is looking to purchase a student engagement system. This will us to engage with students in ways other than just email. It can be used by different departments as well as student clubs and organizations to communicate events and information. I do not have the names of the actual products, but here is a list of the vendors who have given us proposals. Does anybody have feedback on these companies in regards to accessibility of their products? Do you possibly use a similar system from any of these companies? CampusGroups Fundfive Symplicity vFairs UpSquad Element451 Modern Campus Thank you for any help you can give. Robert Lee Beach Assistive Technology Specialist - Student Accessibility & Support Services Kansas City Kansas Community College 7250 State Ave. - Suite # 3384 - Kansas City, KS 66112 O 913-288-7671 | F 913-288-7678 rbeach@kckcc.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From am2621 at hunter.cuny.edu Fri Jun 30 13:16:17 2023 From: am2621 at hunter.cuny.edu (Adina Mulliken) Date: Fri Jun 30 13:16:25 2023 Subject: [Athen] Thank you! Re: How do WCAG & PDF/UA authorize removing running headers and footers from PDFs? Message-ID: Thank you very much to Karen for your reply and to Bevi for your explanation on my level of understanding, haha! That was super helpful. As a librarian, I guess I?m going to be stuck dealing with PDF journal articles (and no original source) for a while still. (I pretty often wonder how many more years.) Adina Mulliken Associate Professor, Librarian Silberman Social Work and Urban Public Health Library Hunter College, City University of New York 2180 3rd Ave. New York, NY Phone 212-396-7665 Pronouns she/her -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From molsson at sbctc.edu Fri Jun 30 13:57:07 2023 From: molsson at sbctc.edu (Monica Olsson) Date: Fri Jun 30 13:57:24 2023 Subject: [Athen] Flip Cards in Canvas In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hi Heather, The way my inbox is filtering ATHEN email is awful right now, so I don' have a good sense on the response you have already received. I want to echo Dan Comden's sentiment here. You don't need to know much about HTML or CSS to do a very basic accessibility/usability audit of the flip card tool for Canvas. Instead, use your keyboard. Set your computer mouse far away from your computer or unplug it! After you open up the flip card tool, use your keyboard to see if you can navigate the keyboard's focus appropriately around the flip card's elements, and then test to see if you can use your keyboard to "flip" the card. WebAIM Keyboard Testing I am guessing you may encounter roadblocks, sadly, which will indicate accessibility issues. Just today I was on a call with a vendor about the flip card design they use in their LMS. It is not accessible and I'm advocating they remove it entirely and provide us an alternative accessible way to interact with the content. [Title: SBCTC logo - Description: Compass] Monica M. Olsson (she/her/hers) Policy Associate ? Accessible IT Coordinator Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges ?Email: molsson@sbctc.edu ? Phone: 360-704-3922 The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect. Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web [cid:07c9ca0f-cba8-4e8c-9425-480e78f099e9] Book time to meet with me ________________________________ From: athen-list on behalf of Dan Comden Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2023 2:17 PM To: Access Technology Higher Education Network Cc: The EDUCAUSE IT Accessibility Community Group Listserv ; WebAIM Discussion List Subject: Re: [Athen] Flip Cards in Canvas [Sent from outside SBCTC] Can't speak to the accessibility of this specific Canvas widget, but keyboard testing is something most anyone can do. Check out nomouse.org for more details. Make sure the same functionality for mouse users is present for keyboard-only folks. -*- Dan On Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 1:08?PM Heather Mariger > wrote: Greetings, I apologize for the cross posting (I need all the help I can get)... I have a faculty member who wants to use flip cards in Canvas. He found this article: Create CSS Flip cards in Canvas While I have a very basic understanding of CSS and HTML, I am in no way qualified to determine if this technique is fully keyboard accessible (I rather suspect not). So, I am reaching out to you brilliant people to ask if these instructions are actually accessible or if you know of a way to make accessible flip cards in Canvas. Thanks so much! H. Heather Mariger Digital Accessibility Advocate Pronouns: She/Her Center for Academic Innovation Chemeketa Community College 4000 Lancaster Drive NE - 9/126A Salem, OR 97305 503.589.7832 ***************** Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance. Verna Myers, author and speaker [https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/mail-sig/AIorK4wz2gxtvjQyMTpC_0WG-EazWKiKpKpBmV7xR5EAWQiTKtGrsvFIo9MV_3-jAopcCt5HPEuWGpw] _______________________________________________ athen-list mailing list athen-list@mailman12.u.washington.edu http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/athen-list -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Outlook-Title_ SBC.png Type: image/png Size: 22672 bytes Desc: Outlook-Title_ SBC.png URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Outlook-pyob5uea.png Type: image/png Size: 528 bytes Desc: Outlook-pyob5uea.png URL: From jhori at ucdavis.edu Fri Jun 30 15:44:39 2023 From: jhori at ucdavis.edu (Joshua Hori) Date: Fri Jun 30 15:44:44 2023 Subject: [Athen] Flip Cards in Canvas In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hello Heather, I see there?s a ?.flip-card:hover?, which is a mouse activity, but it?s missing other input types such as tabbing and tapping (focus). Here?s an article that discusses this more: https://css-tricks.com/focusing-on-focus-styles/ Here?s a really quick to read article on adding ARIA instructions using id?s, with the third example best fitting your flip cards: https://www.tpgi.com/using-aria-describedby-to-provide-helpful-form-hints/ You may want to at least add ?1 out of xxx? to inform the user how many cards there are. The flip cards should be accessible to any user with the above implemented, with the exception of dictation. I?m failing to see how to activate a card without the use of ?Show Numbers?. These numbers are very small when viewing webpages through a VR headset. The VR controllers and hands do not interact with your monitors, you have to use either your voice or the mouse connected to your computer. Most of the times the mouse wins, but I get so happy when it reacts to my voice. I have a Macbook Pro and use Meta Workspaces as it?s the only VR app that works on eduroam. It feels similar to working in Zoom all the time. Distraction free environments for LD users and dictation testing. I intern developmentally disabled students from our SEED program to assist with usability testing. They?re perfect for identifying keyboard issues and I?m building them up for dictation testing. Best, Joshua Hori Accessible Technology Coordinator Information Educational Technology Academic Technology Services 50 Hutchison Dr. Davis, CA 95616 530-752-2439 Schedule a meeting via Calendly From: athen-list on behalf of Monica Olsson Date: Friday, June 30, 2023 at 1:58 PM To: Access Technology Higher Education Network Cc: The EDUCAUSE IT Accessibility Community Group Listserv , WebAIM Discussion List Subject: Re: [Athen] Flip Cards in Canvas Hi Heather, The way my inbox is filtering ATHEN email is awful right now, so I don' have a good sense on the response you have already received. I want to echo Dan Comden's sentiment here. You don't need to know much about HTML or CSS to do a very basic accessibility/usability audit of the flip card tool for Canvas. Instead, use your keyboard. Set your computer mouse far away from your computer or unplug it! After you open up the flip card tool, use your keyboard to see if you can navigate the keyboard's focus appropriately around the flip card's elements, and then test to see if you can use your keyboard to "flip" the card. WebAIM Keyboard Testing I am guessing you may encounter roadblocks, sadly, which will indicate accessibility issues. Just today I was on a call with a vendor about the flip card design they use in their LMS. It is not accessible and I'm advocating they remove it entirely and provide us an alternative accessible way to interact with the content. [Title: SBCTC logo - Description: Compass]Monica M. Olsson (she/her/hers) Policy Associate ? Accessible IT Coordinator Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges ?Email: molsson@sbctc.edu ? Phone: 360-704-3922 The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect. Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web [cid:07c9ca0f-cba8-4e8c-9425-480e78f099e9] Book time to meet with me ________________________________ From: athen-list on behalf of Dan Comden Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2023 2:17 PM To: Access Technology Higher Education Network Cc: The EDUCAUSE IT Accessibility Community Group Listserv ; WebAIM Discussion List Subject: Re: [Athen] Flip Cards in Canvas [Sent from outside SBCTC] Can't speak to the accessibility of this specific Canvas widget, but keyboard testing is something most anyone can do. Check out nomouse.org for more details. Make sure the same functionality for mouse users is present for keyboard-only folks. -*- Dan On Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 1:08?PM Heather Mariger > wrote: Greetings, I apologize for the cross posting (I need all the help I can get)... I have a faculty member who wants to use flip cards in Canvas. He found this article: Create CSS Flip cards in Canvas While I have a very basic understanding of CSS and HTML, I am in no way qualified to determine if this technique is fully keyboard accessible (I rather suspect not). So, I am reaching out to you brilliant people to ask if these instructions are actually accessible or if you know of a way to make accessible flip cards in Canvas. Thanks so much! H. Heather Mariger Digital Accessibility Advocate Pronouns: She/Her Center for Academic Innovation Chemeketa Community College 4000 Lancaster Drive NE - 9/126A Salem, OR 97305 503.589.7832 ***************** Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance. Verna Myers, author and speaker [Image removed by sender.] _______________________________________________ athen-list mailing list athen-list@mailman12.u.washington.edu http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/athen-list -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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