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Hello and welcome to our video on creating accessible documents. When
creating accessible documents you want to make sure they are formatted
appropriately for a persons whom we have visual impairments and use screen
readers. We will review four key ways to do this:
Formatting certain text of headings. Adding alternative text to images.
Formatting tables, and Checking the reading order. You can perform all these
tasks in Microsoft Word and when you save it as a PDF the changes will be
retained in that PDF. Let's start with the first thing we see on this document
which is the banner for the UTA logo. All images need alternative text which
is a text that describes the picture. In this case it doesn't have to be very
detailed because it is just a logo. So, we'll select the picture, you'll right
click on it and go to format picture. And, you'll either get a pop-up or you'll get
this box over to the right. You'll navigate to where there's the part for
alt text. You can add the title which you can just add as UTA logo and in the
description you could be a little bit more descriptive. We might say blue
banner with UTA logo and that's it. Now let's move on to formatting text of
headings. This is important because screen readers allow users to tab
through the headings to more quickly find the information they need. We can
easily do this with styles. One important thing to note is that the title style
does not transfer a title to PDF. It transfers as paragraph text so remember
to only use the heading styles. So, to do this we're going to select the text that
we want to format, and you'll just simply click the heading that you want. In this
case I'm clicking heading one, and we'll do this for everything that should be
formatted as a heading. We'll just go through highlighting and clicking that
heading one style.
If there were any subheadings underneath this then you might want to move on to
the heading 2 style. You can always format the heading styles to match what
you would like, for instance say we did not want the headings to be blue we wanted
them to be black text. You can right click on this heading style and select
modify and here you can change the text color , the text font, size, you can also
come in and change the paragraph. Everything that you can change normally
you can change here and it stays and it would reflect on all of the things you
had two already tagged as heading one. let's look at formatting tables there
are two important things to do here first we want to set the header row to
do this you're going to select the top header row of the table under table
tools you'll click the Layout tab and then you'll click the data button to see
the repeat header rows this classifies the row as a header and if the table had
spanned multiple pages it would repeat the header row at the top of each new
page the second thing we need to do is add alternate text just like we did with
images you'll select the entire table right-click it and select table
properties then we'll go to the alt text tab which is already selected here and
we'll add a title and a description for the title we could enter evaluation
grading policy and for the descriptions we could put this table outlines the
percent of the overall grade for each course component that will be graded and
then click OK the last thing we will look at is the reading order the reading
order tells the screen reader in what order to read text on the screen this
usually doesn't need editing in word but it's very important to check in
PowerPoint when multiple text boxes are used to view the reading order you can
go to the and in the show section choose
navigation pane then you can look through here you can even click through
it and you can make sure that everything appears in the correct order and for
this first page it appears that it does
now let's check to make sure we didn't miss anything by using words built in
accessibility checker you'll click file and then under check for issues you'll
select check accessibility so over here it gives us on the right-hand pane
errors and warnings areas really need to be fixed
and warnings are more just warnings that you should fix them but it's not
absolutely necessary so we're missing alt text for two images if you click it
it'll automatically take you to where that image is it looks like maybe this
is just an image that shouldn't be there because it's not really doing anything
so we'll just click delete and our table stays the same and it disappears over
here and it looks like we've got another image here so we'll also delete that one
now these warnings about unclear hyperlink text just for when you have
the full URL instead of just a description if you want to replace these
or you can do a select the hyperlink right click it go to edit and under text
to display you can change this to nursing library website or whatever
description that used to be for that particular link when you click OK it now
displays the nursing library website text but the link still goes to that
same URL that was listed we are now ready to save this for a document as a
PDF so we'll do file save as
and we'll select PDF
now when we have her PDF we can also check it for accessibility to make sure
that everything came through okay here we go to view tools and accessibility so
let's do the full check and you can leave everything set as the default and
just click start checking and that's telling us the checker found no problems
in this document if it had it would come over here and it would give us a list
similar to how had given us in Word