[music]
Sheryl Burgstahler: I'm Sheryl Burgstahler at the University of Washington in Seattle.
We on our campus, like other campuses,
produce tons of documents to share with our students.
Copies of PowerPoint presentations,
of journal articles, of book chapters, you name it.
Krista Greear: If we extrapolate heavily,
UW offered about 13,000 courses in fall quarter.
And doing the math of 600 pages per each of those classes,
it was about 7.8 million pages of content.
Melinda McRae: This is the course pack for one of our courses
so these are all the collected readings that the students have
for the quarter.
Sheryl: It can be a massive amount of reading for any student.
It's even more of a challenge for students with disabilities.
[Sound of documents coming out of copy machine]
Terrill Thompson: Everybody creates documents
and most people don't realize that all documents are not equal,
that some are more accessible than others.
Sheryl: Students who are blind use screen readers and speech synthesis
to read the contents aloud to them that appears on the screen.
Students with dyslexia and other conditions that impact their reading,
they use screen readers, too.
Even though they can see the content on the screen,
the voice output helps them comprehend that content.
But assistive technology benefits many other students as well.
Krista: Perhaps they have arthritis where they can't manipulate a physical book.
Or they can't carry the weight of the books on their back
so they're really just looking for an electronic-only version.
Perhaps the student might also have low vision
where they need to have an electronic version that can be enlarged.
Melinda: Say you have a class of a hundred students
and you give out the course materials to 90 of those students
and the other 10 students you just say
“Oh, too bad, you can't read these materials.”
And that's really how bad it can be in some classes
if the materials haven't been made accessible.
[Music]
Sheryl: The most inaccessible documents are scanned in or photocopied.
Because they are essentially images, screen readers can't access the text.
Melinda: Here's an example of a really bad photocopy.
You can see it's got underlines, there's been notations made on it.
Sheryl: Our disability services office
provides accommodations for students with disabilities.
But some departments and colleges, like our School of Social Work,
have stepped up to be proactive
in providing accessibly designed documents to their students.
Melinda: It's actually converting this,
which is technically an image, into a piece of text.
Sheryl: A scanner, accompanied by optical character recognition or OCR,
can turn a document into one that is accessible to a screen reader.
It also benefits other students, for instance,
somebody using a mobile device to access the content,
or someone who wants to search through the content
to find the content that they're interested in.
Melinda: The one, I think, really good thing
that is coming out of this is as we're developing
these old image files into text files,
I think it actually helps all the students
because some of these things were pretty unreadable
just as they were.
Shelby: My name is Shelby Keith.
This is my senior year at the University of Washington.
I have dyslexia and dysgraphia and I was diagnosed at the age of seven
so I've always had a challenge with it but I've learned to overcome it.
Sheryl: Shelby uses a screen reader to access documents in her courses,
even a Turkish language course.
[screen reader reading Turkish language]
Shelby: When I'm just reading it myself,
it takes me a lot longer.
I get lost in the text.
I have trouble paying attention, so it really does help
and it makes it so that I can complete the task at hand.
Krista: She's in a program that requires a lot of reading
like every quarter she's reading 10 books on average
-- a ton of reading.
So for her volume is huge.
And so she really utilizes the audio components
where she has a file, pulls it up on her computer,
says computer, read this part of the file or read the whole thing
and then the computer will speak the words to her.
So for that, that helps her to have access to the content
and it also helps her to get through the amount of content
that she needs to read.
Shelby: There was another quarter where actually all of the documents that I wanted,
that I needed to use, were inaccessible.
And it was to the point where I would OCR them
but then they wouldn't be OCR’d correctly
because there was some sort of lock on the files.
So then I would have to go online,
figure out something or talk to some of the support staff here
to figure out how do I unlock the files
so that it’s in a legible format where all of the paragraphs are intact.
Glynis Weaver: Previously in my career
I studied public health
at the Master’s level
and that's when I was diagnosed with ADHD.
Sheryl: Even after obtaining her physician's assistant degree,
Glynis Weaver continues to use accessible documents.
Krista Greear early on was the one
who helped her find assistive technology to do so.
Krista: And what about using electronic books like on a Kindle?
Are there additional benefits from that?
Glynis: There are additional benefits.
The fact that you can highlight a word
that you are unclear on the definition or the context
and it populates the information right there.
It prevents you from going on a fruitless search for the definition.
Sheryl: Posting inaccessible documents
can create a real challenge to students who are blind.
[Music]
Cynthia: It's very frustrating when I need to read an article for a class
or for my research and I'm trying three or four different methods
to make a PDF accessible and sometimes it just doesn't work.
Sheryl: Additional steps are needed
to make documents accessible to people who are blind.
For example, you need text alternatives for graphic images.
And you need to format the headings.
This would be in PowerPoint presentations, in documents created in Microsoft Word, etc.
[Music]
In order for a document to be accessible
to a person who is blind and using a screen reader,
it's important that the heading structure be used.
For example, in Microsoft Word
you should use the heading styles.
Terrill: Headings serve a couple of important functions
for a screen reader user.
One is that they can navigate through a document by its headings,
so they can jump from heading to heading to heading
and their assistive technology will inform them
that they're on a heading of a particular level
so they know this is a Heading Level 2.
That then is a subheading underneath a Heading Level 1
and so that helps them to develop a kind of a mental outline
of the structure of the document.
With most screen readers they can do that just by pressing the ‘H’ key
to jump to the first heading.
screen reader: Introduction to Physics Course Syllabus Heading Level 1.
Terrill: And if I press ‘H’ again…
screen reader: Textbook Heading Level 2.
Terrill: And again.
screen reader: Course Objectives Heading Level 2.
Class schedule, Heading Level 2.
Grades, Heading Level 2.
Hadi Rangin: My name is Hadi Rangin.
I am the information technology accessibility specialist
at the University of Washington.
Sheryl: Hadi’s an expert, but he's also a user of accessible technology.
Hadi: For a few seconds you skim through the document,
you just want to know what is in this document.
How is it built?
What are the major components of this article that you are reading?
This helps you to focus on the desired section that you would like to study further.
Without that you have to read top to bottom because everything has the same weight.
Sheryl: Sighted users use visual cues like bold headings to navigate a document.
But for someone using a screen reader, if the heading structure is not used,
they will just get a big string of text.
Nothing stands out.
[Music]
Sheryl: Diagrams and photos can be made accessible in a variety of ways.
Cynthia: Alternative text actually tells
a person who can't see the image exactly what is in the image.
Sheryl: Nearly all authoring tools
provide options for providing alternative text.
If that's not provided, then a person who's blind and using a screen reader
will not be able to access the content presented in that image.
Terrill: Here’s what we hear.
screen reader: Graphic photo.
Terrill: So it identifies it as a graphic, and the only alt text is "photo"
which obviously doesn’t communicate the essence of this image.
The sighted user gets a lot more out of this than a screen reader user does.
Sheryl: An example of a way to do this in Microsoft Word
is to right-click on the image and then select format picture
and then under alternative text, to type in the text that would fully describe that image
for someone who can't actually see it.
Terrill: Now I press arrow to go to the image.
screen reader: Graphic: side by side comparison of two photos of McCarty Glacier in Alaska.
In 1909 the massive glacier stretched to the horizon.
Sheryl: Making a document accessible does not affect its visual appeal or its integrity.
Terrill: Anybody who's creating a document
really needs to do that legwork upfront to be sure the document is accessible.
Melinda: The percentage of students
who actually request an accommodation is much, much, much lower
than the actual number of students who have a disability of some sort
so we may have a request from one student for a class
and you can almost guess
that there's probably two other students in that class
who will benefit from the accommodation.
Sheryl: It's easier to build in accessibility
when a document’s being created than waiting until after the fact.
And if you build in accessibility, it will diminish the need
for accommodations for students with disabilities.
For more information on IT accessibility, consult
www.uw.edu/accessibility
This video was created with funding from UW Information Technology.
Copyright 2016 University of Washington
Permission is granted to copy these materials for noncommercial educational purposes
provided the source is acknowledged.