Understanding and Complying with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act: A Webinar for OJJDP TTA Providers October 25, 2012

Transcription

1 Understanding and Complying with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act: A Webinar for OJJDP TTA Providers October 25, 2012 Moderator Kovener, Project Director, OJJDP s National Training and Technical Assistance Center (NTTAC) Presenter Patrick, Web Accessibility Consultant/Senior Associate, IC F International Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us for the webinar, Understanding and Complying with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, a Webinar for OJJDP TTA Providers. We re glad to see all of you here. There are 42 of you on the webinar with us. We d like to start by going over some of the features of our webinar platform to help you maximize your webinar experience. I m Kovener and I ll be the moderator today. I serve as the project director for OJJDP s National Training and Technical Assistance Center (NTTAC). Welcome! The first thing I want to point out to you is the chat window. You ll see it here. It shows on this slide. It s on the right side of your screen. If you have questions during today s webinar for our presenter,, please make sure that Host is selected, which is the default (you should see it that way there now) and just chat your question. We will be picking up these questions during the webinar and we ll be stopping for a couple of different breaks and answer those questions. The questions that we don t get to today, we ll try to get answered and posted for you in writing after the webinar. We re also going to be doing some polling today during our webinar and you will see the poll questions appear in that same window area. When we get to those you ll see the question, you ll select your answer, and then you ll hit the submit key in the lower right. The other thing we d like to do today is have you help us count how many of you are out there. If you would, right now, take a minute and practice using the chat window. If you re in an office and several people are watching this from your computer, send us a chat and let us know your name and how many people are with you in the room. That way, we can know how many people that we ve been able to reach today. Thank you for joining us for Understanding and Complying with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. The focus of our webinar today is how Section 508 applies to our work as TA providers for OJJDP. Our audience today includes everyone from trainers to programmers and so this event is really designed to give you a 30,000-foot view. We re trying to make this information as applicable as we can across a broad continuum. There are several handouts, which you received this morning hopefully with the PowerPoint presentation to help you follow along. The handouts have been designed to help you apply 1

2 the concepts that we re going to be talking about today. As we go through, we d really like you to think about some next steps that we could take at OJJDP s National Training and Technical Assistance Center to help you continue to learn in this area. Our objectives for the webinar today are listed here. We d like to help you understand the principles of 508 and how they apply to you, really understand why we re doing this and how people with disabilities are impacted if we don t comply with Section 508, and provide some resources for you to get started on this journey to being 508-compliant. To do that, we have a really top-notch 508 compliance expert here with us to talk to you and that s. You ll have some chances to ask her questions. First of all, we d like to find out some information about who is on this webinar today. This is our first poll question. If you could please let us know what your role is in developing the content that is on your website for your TA project are you creating that content as a subject matter expert? Are you the programmer that actually codes it or are you doing something else? If you choose other type into the chat window what your other is. Go ahead and take a look at these choices and let us know what your role is. We re going to go ahead and close this so that you can see how you all answered. It will be coming up in one second here. It looks like of those of you who answered we ve got mostly content creators and others. Let s look at chat and see what other roles you are in and we ll do that as we go along. Let s take a look at our second poll question. We d like to know what your experience is working with Section 508 compliance. Your choices range from none and it s what you do all day long. Go ahead and answer from these five selections if you would. Okay, we re going to go ahead and close that poll and the answers will come up on your screen in just a few seconds. It looks like an even mix between familiarity with 508 and having done some content. That s good. I think the way that we ve designed our content for today will help the majority of you a lot. Again, think about what other things we can do to help you learn about this area in the future and you ll have a chance at the end and throughout to chat to us and let us know that. I d like to introduce Patrick who is our presenter today. is a web accessibility consultant at ICF International. She is our go-to resource for the National Training and Technical Assistance Center for OJJDP. Section 508 compliance is all she does every day so she brings a wealth of experience to help us all understand our role as TA providers to make our websites and the electronic materials that we create accessible to everybody who needs them.? Thank you so much for inviting me here to speak about Section 508. I m delighted to be here and excited to see that we have a large and diverse audience interested in making our part of the Web a more accessible place for people with disabilities. When I tell people what I do for a living, the most common reaction is, How does a blind person use a computer? Here is Anna, and she s going to tell us how she uses the computer using a screen-reader (JAWS). I m going to share a video with you. 2

3 [Video of Anna begins] Using the JAWS program has been the way for me to do research using the Internet, typing papers, reading my textbooks, and for work also. I have worked in different locations where I have used the JAWS program and a special technology for the blind. Most of the technology is audio technology and I want to show you how I ve been using this this not only for school but for everyday life just typing papers, reading books/newspapers. I m going to be showing you we, the blind, do not when we use JAWS we don t turn on the monitor. I usually have my monitor off because we do not use the mouse. We use a combination of hotkeys to jump from one place to the other. For a sighted person you use a mouse to click on whatever you want to go to. We use a combination of hotkeys. For example, this is how JAWs for Windows would sound. I do insert T and that reads what is on my screen so that way I know where I am. It sounds a little different but we get used to it. I can make it speak fast or slow and it has different voices. It could be female or male or grandpa or grandma. This is the voice that I prefer. Currently I am on my Google--on the page of Google. If I want to go and research to find a webpage for example, I do control alt. It tells me that it s open so I ll type in the Fullerton.edu. I press enter. So I hear that it s in California State University of Fullerton. For a sighted person you click on the link you want to go to. We cannot click because we re not able to use the mouse so we use one of the shortcuts (insert F7). It lists my links and then I just arrow down (current students). Then I just click on the link that I want to go to and it will take me to whatever link I want to go. That s how I ve been able to do research for school. [Video of Anna ends] When we create changes that are accessible to the handicapped, we re going to help people like Anna read the Web. The blind is only one group of people that are covered by Section 508. We re going to discover more of those people later. Section 508 has been on the books since 1973 and it s not going to go away. In fact, there s a current Section 508 and there s a new ruling under review right now. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act tries to ensure that people with disabilities have the same or comparable access to Federal government information and services as those without disabilities. This includes Federal employees and members of the public. This applies to you as creators of documents that will be put on a Federal government site. Section 508 covers a lot. It covers computer hardware and software, kiosks, and telephones. What we re going to focus on today is the web-based electronic information and applications. Here s another poll question for you. What I d like to you is answer in the poll area. You can check as many boxes as you like. We want to know what types of electronic documents you think Section 508 standards apply to. Word? PDF? PowerPoint? Websites? Excel? We re going to check in a couple of 3

4 minutes to see what you answered. Okay, you guys know your stuff because if you checked all you were correct. Most of you checked all. Here is a partial list of the electronic information that Section 508 applies to. It covers everything from Web pages, Office products, and we re going today to talk a little bit about webpages. We re going to talk a little bit later more about Word and PowerPoint and then we re going to talk some about PDF and a little bit about video. This part of Section 508 consists of 16 requirements that specifically discuss various elements that might be found in webpages, Office products, and PDF files. Let s take some time to think about these elements. Of course, there is text but there are also a variety of images some audio and some video. The Web is in color. It s not purely black and white. You can also find data tables and even elements that move. Some websites have large maps/have image maps like the one on this page that contain links or hotspots that do something when you click them. For the more technical people out there in the audience, these elements are also mentioned in Section 508. We need to consider the people with disabilities when creating forms, using style sheets, and timed responses. We re created a handout for you that has specific language from Section 508 (this particular part of 508) and it also has a link that takes you to a place that will show you some examples. This is what it looks like. This you should have gotten in your this morning. We ll also have a link to it from the webinar later. I mentioned earlier that there is a new version of Section 508 under review and the word on the street is that it will go into effect by the end of next year. Right now there are 16 standards. When the new Section 508 is in effect, there will be 46. It s hard now. It s going to be even harder later. What I d like you to do is start thinking of some questions. Remember to type them in your chat window. We ll have a break in a few minutes to answer your questions. Let s talk about the folks who benefit from Section 508. We ll focus on disabilities, especially the blind, because those are the people that really are impacted with computers and the Internet. We ll also discuss hearing and motor disabilities. The group that benefits most from Section 508 is most likely the ones with visual disabilities, especially the blind. The incidence of blindness will probably go up as the population ages so we could be talking about my grandparents, your grandparents. It s not just people that are born blind. There are people that are becoming blind as they get older. What I want you to imagine right now is that you go into work one morning and a prankster has hidden your monitor. Think about the things that we talked about earlier. Think about the elements on webpages and PDF files or Word files that you re not going to be able to see without having your 4

5 monitor. This will give you sort of an idea what it s like to be a blind computer user (not really, but it sort of gives you an idea of that). Let s pretend that you get your monitor back but the prankster has turned off all the images in your browser and you ve just forgotten how to turn them back on and you need to do some research. What images are you going to really miss? Will you miss the decorative images? Will you miss the line that divides different sections of a webpage? Will you miss images that link to another site? What about that bar graph? Will you miss that? Which images convey meaning and which images could be deleted and no information would be lost? It would be really good if you had descriptions of those things because you don t have your images but it would be great if you had some descriptions. Luckily there is a way to describe images and it s pretty simple. It s called alternate text or alt text for short. Alt text is available to use on all electronic documents, not just websites. Remember Anna? We met her earlier in the video. When she navigates to an image on a webpage or in a document, her screen reader announces it. It actually says image and then it reads exactly what the alt text says. This way, Anna and other visually impaired people, other blind people, will get the same information as a sighted person does. Examples of some alt text? On the NTTAC website, or I think it was in a document from the NTTAC website, there is a picture of somebody being handcuffed and that is next to a link. The picture supplements the link but if Anna came across that she really wouldn t care that there is a picture of somebody being handcuffed. She really cares about what s in the link. That could have no alt text at all or it could have blank alt text. The OJJDP logo? That s a logo that you would simply say OJJDP logo. Also on the NTTAC website there is a link. It s an image that says training center. All you need for that is that this is the text that is going to take you to the training center but a blind person, somebody using a screen reader, really what they want to know is where is the link going to take me? They won t need to know that the screen had blue writing. Those were easy. This is a chart from a PDF. What I want you to do is take a moment and think about how you would describe this chart to someone over the phone. The person to whom you are describing this chart does not have a copy of the chart. You need to describe the chart in detail and you need to not make any judgments but just describe the chart. Think about what you would say. Can this chart be described in a few words? No, it needs a lengthy description. I attempted to write some alt text for this. I m sure that I missed out a lot. I m sure I missed the nuances that the author, when the author put this in the document, would have probably written something else. That s why it s really important that the authors of the document be the people writing the alt text. They must be the people writing the alt text because people who get the PDF, who remediate the PDF, might not quite get what that chart meant. We ve also prepared some handouts that show how to write alt text. It looks like this. This has a lot more information in it. It s Checking and Remediating PDF Files for Accessibility and it also has some detailed information on how to write alt text. 5

6 Let s take a look at NTTAC s banner. If Anna were to come to the NTTAC website, one of the first things she would hear or her screen reader would read to her is this banner. Here s what it looks like to a sighted person. It has a number of images, several links, a search field, and this also is (going back to something we talked about earlier) an image map. An image map doesn t have to be a map. It s just an image with a lot of links. This is how it looks to a sighted person. This is how it would look to a person who can t see it because all they hear is what the image is saying. In this case, the first image is a link to OJJDP. When Anna comes to this link she would hear a program of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention text. Does this describe the image? Yes, it does, but keep in mind that this is a link to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Should it say a program of the and is the word text necessary? Do you think this could be confusing to Anna? The second image and the third image both link to the NTTAC home page. For the first image Anna is going to hear OJJDP NTTAC logo and National Training Assistance text. That s for the first image. Does this describe the image? Yes, this does describe the image but it s a link. Do you think the words logo and text probably are not necessary there? It just really needs to describe where the link is going to take someone. The next image? This is a picture of a group of kids and Anna will hear picture of a group of kids. Does this describe the image? Yes, this describes the image. Does Anna really care that this is a picture of a group of kids? Probably not. She probably just wants to know where this link is going to take her. The screen reader is going to say link and then it s going to read the alt text. Finally, on this page there are seven images that have alt text: image of a cluster of colored boxes building a square. Now Anna doesn t need to know that there are seven images like that. That s unimportant. So though they re given blank or null alt text, they re actually part of the link so they should be taken out of the link but that s a little bit more technical. Another barrier to the blind is when headings are not used or are used incorrectly. Believe it or not, headings are an important part of accessibility for the blind. I want you to imagine again. This time I want you to go back to high school or college and remember your textbooks. Now imagine that they don t have any headings. You can t tell what is a chapter title/ what is a subheading. People who use screen readers often navigate webpages, PDF documents, and Word documents using the headings alone just to know what that document s about like you might have skimmed your headings when you were studying for a test just to know what the document was about. In a survey from May 2012, 80 percent of the screen readers that took that survey found headings useful and that they used them. This is a good reason. This is a really good reason for using headings. Just because something is bold and in larger font it s not a heading. That s the superficial formatting that looks like a heading to a sighted person but that does not convey it s a heading to a screen reader user. On webpages and in PDF you can use the headers and the headers have <H1> through <H6> tags. For Word, you re going to use styles to create headings. We re going to talk a little bit more about that later. We ve also created a document that will show you in detail how to use styles. 6

7 Have you ever seen a form that says something like, Form fields in red are required. A blind person will not know when the text is in red and the screen reader is not going to alert the blind person that it s in red. This is why you now see asterisks in required form fields. This is also going to benefit colorblind people as well as somebody who prints out the page. Be sure that you don t use color alone to provide information; you have to use another way to provide information. Can you see why this is a bad use of color? Anna, she said was from southern California. Let s say that she wants to buy an iphone and let s suppose she lives in Santa Monica and is looking at this with her screen reader. The screen reader is going to read through the list and then it s going to get to the icon and she won t know it because it s red. She won t know that this is a red icon telling her that unfortunately the iphone is not available. She might take a bus or a taxi to the Apple store and be disappointed that there is no iphone there. This is better. On this page the word unavailable is put next to the phones that are not available to the red icons and available is put next to the green icons. If you have been paying attention you re probably going to say, Why can t we put alt text on those little icons? Why can t we say red icon? or for the red you could say unavailable and for the greens you could say available. That would work, too, and it would work for the blind. It s not a help to the colorblind person, though, but that would help the blind for this. Websites and electronic documents use tables a lot to present data. These tables are really hard for a screen reader to navigate. Sometimes they re hard for me to navigate. Luckily there is a way to help people like Anna navigate tables. It s all done behind the scenes with specific code or markup. Here s a table. It looks like a regular table. I can figure it out but this table behind the scenes has no markup. When Anna comes to this table, this is what her screen reader will read to her. N percent of cases program % external evaluator 30. It s going to read across the rows and down to the next row and down to the next row and down to the next row. This is not going to be very useful for somebody with a screen reader. Now this table has some markup. It looks exactly like the table on the other slide but this one has some behind-the-scenes markup. This one has different table headers so the N and percent of cases are called column headers and the first column is row headers. It also uses what is called scope and those are very simple to put into PDF. It s not so simple to make a table accessible in Word but there are a couple of things you can do. This is how this table would be read by a screen reader. You would just make the table and go into the table and it s going to say it s a table with five rows and three columns. It s going to read what row 1 is. It doesn t say anything for the first cell because the first cell is blank but then it s going to go and it s going to say N and percent of cases. Then it s going to mention that this is a row header programs is a row header. This makes it lot easier for someone using a screen reader to figure out what this table is about. We ve also created a handout for you, Creating Accessible Documents Using 7

8 Word. Oh, I m sorry, wrong one Remediating Accessibility for PDFs and I think we ve probably showed you this one already. This one gives you details on how to make tables in PDF files accessible. I want you to imagine, again. Remember the prankster in your office who took away your monitor earlier and turned off your images? This time he or she has hidden your mouse. How are you going to get your work done without your mouse? You d only have a keyboard. Once you learn how to use a keyboard that s kind of easy. Sometimes, though, people on webpages will make scripts that say you have to use a mouse. An important thing is if you re a website designer don t use scripts that require mouse usage. Make sure that your websites are mouse independent. Another visual disability that is often ignored when designing for the Web is colorblindness. This image shows how people with varying degrees of colorblindness might see the United States flag. Some people do see. Actually, we just had a question here. Colorblindness is considered a disability under Section 508? Yes, it is. You can see that color can be used. It s just that some people aren t going to see. They see color but they may not see the same colors. The barriers for somebody who is colorblind? We ve already talked about why using color as the only means for conveying information is a bad idea. But also we need to be aware that there are certain color combinations that might cause some problems, depending on what kind of colorblindness somebody might have. Try to avoid the color combinations on this list. You can use red and green. You can use light green and yellow on a webpage. Just try not to layer them. Try not to put red text on green background or blue text on purple background or try not to like in the description earlier with the iphone, don t make red and green the two different choices. That also goes back to don t use color as the only means of providing information. We re going to step away from the people with visual disabilities now. Let s talk about people who are deaf. The deaf also have obstacles on the Internet. As with the blind, the incidence of deafness is rising as the United States ages. Here we ve got one more video for you and this is a video of a man named Kyle and he is going to show you why he s having difficulty with an animation that has sound. [Video of Curtis begins] I m not disabled. I have an inability to hear. However, we re more of a linguistic minority. [Female voice: This is where the sound begins.] Oh, really? I wouldn t have even known that. I would have just been aware of the visual picture, but not the auditory stimulus. It seems like there is some kind of interaction or swapping that takes place here. Then it looks like again this is going to the heart and then is passing out another section of the heart. That site is hard to read. I m guessing that there is speaking that is going on but again I m unaware of what they re saying. I have the responsibility now to assume what I m being instructed. There s a lot of guesswork involved in this. As I looked at the program I found it interesting. There was a lot of information that I was able to read due to the text. There were also a lot of graphic images and because of those things I was able to assume what was on there. A friend of mine who is hearing was able to tell me that there was spoken information on there. It didn t seem to include 8

9 everything. There were some important bullets though, I believe, in some of the parts where they had some audio types of instruction. It was more of a puzzle that I had to put the pieces together to try to figure out what it was meaning. I think the most important thing that s done is that when there is a voice on a video there needs to be captioning. There doesn t need to be this fancy art or these extravagant graphics. It s just that everything that s said they just need to caption it. We need access to that and it s just that simple. I don t have any mental problems. I m not mentally slow. I don t have any disabilities. I can think. I can read. I can write. I can do anything that anyone else can do except hear and I want that person to respect me and I think that that would solve a lot of problems. [Video of Curtis ends] Alright, I got his name wrong. It s Curtis, not Kyle sorry about that. As Curtis explained, it s important to caption any video that has sound and it s not enough just to provide a transcript for videos. To comply with Section 508 and to do the right thing you must make sure that the captioning is synchronous and that it goes along with the video. Those with upper-body motor problems may also have difficulty using computers and as with visual and auditory disabilities, more people have motor disabilities as the population ages. As with the blind, make sure you re your site or your document is navigable with your keyboard and that you don t need the mouse. Some people can t use the mouse. I know some brilliant people with cerebral palsy. As a matter of fact, the man used to be vice president of Wells Fargo. They have trouble using the mouse but they type letters. The woman has written a couple of books. You just have to make sure that you think about people that have trouble using their hands as well. Finally, a small percentage of people have seizures when presented with strobing or flashing lights. Slow-moving slideshows are fine but quickly flashing or flickering images such as the episodes of Pokémon that caused several children in Japan in 1997 to have seizures is not. No flashing lights. It s also distractible to somebody that might have an attention problem. That was a lot of information. We re going to stop here for questions. Thanks,. The first question that came in from several of you was a variation of who has to do this. Who has to comply with Section 508? Are TA provider websites considered Federal websites? Does Section 508 apply if you are an organization that receives a variety of funding and some of that comes from government sources? Is it grantees? Is it contractors? The idea behind Section 508 is that if this is a federally sponsored project and a federally sponsored website or materials that they should be 508- compliant. If Federal funds are used and OJJDP for example is considering this a resource that they re providing to the field, that should be 508-compliant. The law does talk about contractors and grantees. 9

10 Having said that, 508 technically applies to OJJDP as a Federal agency so the onus is on OJJDP to provide compliant materials. Our goal here is to help all of OJJDP s TA providers get to the place where they can help OJJDP meet that goal. We ll talk a little bit more about that later and the continuum involved there. One of the other first questions that came in that I d like to direct to you,, is what kinds of additional work will be required under the 508 refresh? What are these new guidelines all about? To be honest, I have it on my computer. I ve not really, really read it but what I know for sure is that at this point, even though I discussed headings, headings are not part of Section 508. They re not mentioned in 508. When you get your document you ll say, Why did she talk about headings? They are not part of Section 508 but they are definitely going to be part of the new guidelines. The new law doesn t have a list like the old law does. It doesn t have 16 things right in the law but what it does is it points to what is called WCAG. It is part of the W3C [World Wide Web Consortium]. It s the Web accessibility. I can t quite remember what the acronym means but it points directly to that and that has 46 guidelines so it doesn t even write its own guidelines. It points right to the WCAG [Web Content Accessibility Guidelines] guidelines. How about the videos that you ve used throughout this presentation,? Are those available for people to use? Yes, they are. As a matter of fact, the video that I used from the deaf man is part of the WebAIM. WebAIM is a really great place to go to find out more about Section 508 and accessibility and those are all in the tutorial. You ll have a link to that in your resources. The video of Anna? She is called The Argent 1 or something like that and she s got that on YouTube. She has several different videos of herself using the Internet for training and she and I have actually been ing back and forth. She was happy to know she was being used in this. That s great. We re also going to send those links out to you in the chat window right now so you ll have a chance to get those. A couple of technical questions, do live PowerPoint slides need to be described by a screen reader to be compliant in a live event? That is a good question. In a live event? I m not positive on that. That s something I m going to have get back to you. I think that for instance for this, for what we re doing here, for somebody who is deaf they wouldn t be able to hear the audio and technically it should be captioned as it happens. As for the PowerPoint, I m not sure. That s something I ll have to get back to you. 10

11 Another question came in in this regard. One of you asked or pointed out that these steps seem like they could be a full-time job and it does require a significant amount of labor to make documents 508- compliant. But the question is, is this all or nothing compliance? Can we prioritize particular aspects of this? We ll talk about this more later but we re not really trying to present this as an all or nothing proposition. We are going to at this point or in a few minutes will talk about what are the key best practices in making documents compliant and we re also going to talk about how NTTAC can help you with this. Our challenge to you today is to do something and to do the best that you can with the resources that you have. Another couple of technical questions, how easy is it to make Excel documents compliant? Excel is what I know least about but from what I understand Excel is pretty much compliant out of the box. But I have to be honest with you. Spreadsheets are not my forte. I think from what I understand that if we re talking about Excel documents just like the spreadsheet that can be pretty compliant. If you ve got a graph, if you make something into a graph, then you re going to have to describe that graph but also if you ve got a graph in the table that created that graph, a screen reader user can use that table. I think there are some special things you can do to the tables to make them more compliant. That s something else that we ll have to do a little bit of research on and let you know. One of the things that we can do as a follow-on to this (and we re interested in your feedback about what you could use) are particular skill-building sessions on working with certain kinds of documents. If that s something that would be helpful to you please let us know. Another technical question, when you were talking about headers a while back you referenced <H1> to <H6> on webpages. What was that about? That s the tag and it s been a while since I ve actually done coding but that would be like <H1> would be the largest heading or the main heading of a webpage and then it would go down to <H2>. It s (I can never say the word) hierarchy and <H1> would be the main and then you may have several <H2> that might be the subheadings and then <H3> would be below that. That is definitely for sure in PDFs and I do believe that s how it s done in webpages., regarding online courses, if we were to create a separate downloadable PDF document that contains all of the audio and the written text in that online course, would that be considered 508- compliant? If it s like a transcript, that isn t quite right but if it s a separate PDF with the audio, the audio is going to need to be described. If there s a video, the video is going to need to have captioning. 11

12 So it may be that we need to come back to this with some live Q&A during another session so that we can talk about specific scenarios and actually talk voice to voice. We re going to have a chance for some more questions but why don t we go ahead and talk a little bit more about the process and about what we re proposing here. As an OJJDP TA broker, NTTAC is required to create 508-compliant materials. What we d like to do is help all of you get as close as you can to also providing 508-compliant materials. What we d like to propose in term of a workflow kind of process is that you all create final documents. It s important that (and we learned this the hard way) if you create a document and we do a 508 check on it and then you make some changes to it (and when I say you I mean anybody this happened internally within the NTTAC team) then it has to be 508 checked all over again. So it s important to start with a finalized source document whether that s a Word file, a PowerPoint, an Excel file, or what have you. What we d like you to do is take the original source file finalized and then convert that to PDF and then check and make sure that that looks the way that you want it to look. If you re able after this webinar with your existing skills and capacity or after some more training to actually do the 508 compliance check and send it to us as a 508-compliant document, that would be our best case scenario. If you are not, what we d like you to do is send us that source file and the PDF and we ll do that work for you (that 508 compliance check). Then we would upload this to, for example, the OJJDP training center. That s probably the main way that we would be working with you in this regard. There is a handout on this kind of process and it s sort of a set of guidelines for you in doing this. I want to point out this proposed process and now is going to talk about some of the actual tips for how we can get documents as compliant as possible. Then we can come back to this and see if it makes sense. When you re working in a Word document and some of this will also pertain to PowerPoint but we ll talk about those later, but as I talked before, I mentioned styles. When you use styles when you re working with Word they do a lot of wonderful things. You can create headings and you can use styles to make sure that the body text looks the same. Once you ve got those in there with the click of a button you can change the way it looks if you want. You just click a couple of buttons and change the way it looks instead of having to go back and do the formatting on each one of the headings yourself. Another thing, when you use styles to create headings, you can create a table of contents with the click of a button and you can update the table of contents and it s wonderful. Using styles is something that if you don t know how to use yet, it s something you really should learn because it makes your life a lot easier. Backing up a little bit, it s really important to start the accessibility in Word and as just said, it s going to make it a lot easier for a lot of people, but also suppose you created a Word document and you did have to make a change. If it was as accessible as possible in the first place, then it s not going to be so hard if it is turned into a PDF again. The final document is really important but sometimes you do have to make a change. If it is as accessible from the beginning then it s going to be a lot easier when it s turned into a PDF to make that accessible. You can add alt text in Word and in PowerPoint and it s 12

13 really, really simple. Once you ve got it written, writing is not quite as easy as actually putting it in the Word document. Here s an image that shows you where to find the way to put alt text in Word and PowerPoint. Here we re talking about Office 2010 and this is where it is. It s different in It s different in But this is Office You right-click on the image that you want to write alt text for and when the menu pops up you go to the bottom of the menu where it says format picture. A window will open. At the bottom of that window on the left-hand side, you click alt text and then you ll get two form fields. You ll get one that says title and you want to leave that one blank because it doesn t convert to a PDF. I ve never gotten it to convert to PDF. Maybe I m doing something wrong but it doesn t seem to work right. Then there s a description. That s where you want to put your alt text. Then when a screen reader user reads that Word file they ll be able to hear what that chart or what that graph is. This is Word and PowerPoint. It works both ways in those files. Some more best practices for PowerPoint? Use the layouts that are already provided. Don t add text boxes. A lot of people will say, I need to put a text box here to add some more information. You shouldn t do that. You can go back to the master slide and make it there. The text boxes will not be read by a screen reader in that PowerPoint file and then when it s converted to PDF it might be messed up. The person making the PDF is just going to have to do extra work if you ve added extra text boxes. Be sure to add alt text. It would really be cool if someone created an accessible template and then all of your projects could be made with that accessible template and then it would be so much easier when it s turned into a PowerPoint. Best practices for PDF? Suppose you are the one who makes the PDF. Make sure that when you make the PDF that you choose the correct method for turning a Word or a PowerPoint file into a PDF and make sure that you choose the option to tag it. That s all in one of the documents that you ve got. It s in the section about creating accessible files with 2010 documents (Office 2010). This is actually what the tags on a PDF look like. Tags are very important. A screen reader is going to read the tags and it s going to read the tag order. So you want to make sure your PDF is tagged. Untagged PDFs are not acceptable and remember the very best way to create accessible PDF files is to make sure the source file is as accessible as possible. You ll need some tools to do this. The best ones right now are the latest versions of Acrobat Professional and Office. It has to be Acrobat Professional. They just came out with a new version of Acrobat. I ve not played with it yet although I bought it for myself for a treat. It s supposed to be better than Version 10, though Version 10 is very good. Version 9 will work but it doesn t work quite as well and it has a few bugs. Microsoft Office Version 2010 is really the best. To use 2007 works, but not as well. Finally, I ve saved the best for last. Office 2010 has this handy-dandy accessibility checker. It s really good if you re starting out learning about accessibility. How do you get there? It s kind of hard to find but what you do is you open a document that you re working on (that maybe you ve just finished or 13

14 maybe you re working on it). You want to click the File tab at the top of the menu the ribbon I guess that s called. Then you go down to Info. Info is probably going to be highlighted anyway but you want to make sure that s highlighted. You want to go to check for issues and that s going to open up a little menu. You re going to choose the middle option where it says check accessibility. What will happen then is your page will open again to where you were and it will do a quick check. Then on the right-hand side of your document it will tell you what s missing. Maybe you don t have any headings or maybe your tables don t have headers or something. It will tell you things that might be wrong with your document. It will also tell you why to fix it and it will also tell you how to fix it. This is really handy for somebody who is just starting out with accessibility or to somebody that knows about it and wants to double-check and make sure their file is accessible. Let s talk about some resources and next steps and then come back to some questions. There in your handouts that you got there is one titled Resources. There is a plethora of different trainings and actual tools that you can use to do compliance checking on your own materials and on your websites. The first step that we d like to suggest is that you assess your own website and electronic materials and see what state they re in. The example that gave was the OJJDP NTTAC website and clearly we have some work to do to make our website more 508-compliant. In that list of resources there is a tool that you can use to check websites and there are also some different checking tools for documents. The next step is to evaluate what your capacity is to do this within your agency. There have been questions about how much this is going to cost, how much time this is going to take, and what we need to do. just talked about some of the bare minimum things that I think we can all do to make our materials and our websites more compliant. If you were to buy a copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional for $250 and if you were to buy a copy of Microsoft Office 2010 for $200 and you do just a little bit of training, you d be surprised at how much you can do to move the needle. If you can train the staff in your agencies and your projects to add alt text to their documents and to use headings, we re so far ahead just doing those two things. Check out the resources. There are various trainings, there are tutorials, there are things on YouTube, there are things on federally sponsored websites, and there is a lot of training. If anything, the challenge is to find where to start with all of that training. Then let s talk about how we can help and how OJJDP NTTAC can help you take the next steps. After this webinar is over, an evaluation survey will pop up and one of the questions is what additional assistance you or your organization need for this topic. We d really like to hear from you there what you think the next step might be. Lastly, ask us for help. Callie, listed here, is your contact with NTTAC. She is a contact to who can answer questions for us. We re all in this together and trying to move forward and do a better job with all of this. A few more questions have come in. Somebody asked if there is a date by which we need to have all of our materials compliant. The date is now. The date has been since the seventies. This isn t a new process that s being imposed. Someone else asked is this process only for agencies or is this requirement only for agencies that receive OJJDP funding. This is Federal government-wide. So any websites sponsored by the Federal government are supposed to be 508-compliant. Hopefully with the kinds of steps that has just outlined and some kind of simple first steps we can do this without having to add a lot to everyone s budget. It s a matter of practice as you do this work, as you take a 14

15 PowerPoint and work on making it compliant. The more you do it the easier it gets to be. Another question for you, are there Federal naming conventions for alt text? For example, does it matter whether you call something a link versus text or image versus a picture? Not really. There are places that you can go to learn more about how to write alt text. I really think it depends on your agency and if your agency has conventions then you go by those agency versions. As a matter of fact, I was doing another presentation the other day and I just mentioned for some images like there was a man who was being handcuffed (whether it was a man or a woman I don t know but they were being handcuffed) and I said that you shouldn t give that any alt text. But somebody in the group said, No, in our agency you ve got to give it. I think it was the Department of Education. You have to describe every image. You ve got to briefly describe every image. I think it really depends on your agency. What if tables are only used for formatting a page and no header rows are used? Does that still need? No. As a matter of fact I think it actually says in the law not in the law, the new one. It s in the new refresh. It says that you cannot use header rows if it s for formatting a page. That would be violating the new Section 508 if you used header rows in a formatting table. Does Office s accessibility checker work for PowerPoint? I do believe it does. I ve not used it for PowerPoint but I do believe it does work. Okay, here s another question. The question is how do you make recorded webinars 508-compliant? I m going to tell you what we do with OJJDP NTTAC webinars and then I m going to ask to tell you what the best practice would be because I don t think we re all the way there yet either. What we do is we post the recording and then we create an actual audio transcript. We post that transcript along with all of our handouts and materials and we run all those written materials through a 508-compliance check so that when someone comes to the OJJDP NTTAC website everything that they will see on that page has been checked so that somebody could view that through a screen reader or using other assistive technology but is going to tell you we should be going further. Well, as I mentioned earlier, live sessions are actually supposed to be there is supposed to be captioning going on. There should be live captioning going on but they really should have captioning. WebEx? I m not sure WebEx does it. I don t really know WebEx that well. There is other software that 15

16 is a little bit more compliant or more accessible. They have more tools for accessibility. There is a way to make these Section 508-compliant. I was thinking about this other question that somebody asked regarding online training courses and if you could create a separate downloadable PDF of a document that contains audio and written text. What you can do is when you convert a PowerPoint file to a PDF file there is an option to convert the speaker notes and it is toggle on and off. I ve been playing with that and those are accessible. A screen reader will read those so that is an option to put everything that was said at that point in the transcript. You look at what the transcript said and then you re going to take that bit of the transcript, since you re making one of those anyway, and put those in the speaker notes. Then when you convert the file to a PDF file, you use the option to convert speaker notes and that will actually, I think, meet Section 508 at least until the refresh. I m not sure what s going to happen then. We re getting some questions about the actual compliance-checking process and I just want to go back over that for everybody. There are two kinds of compliance-checking tools and there are various tools that you can run your whole website through a 508-compliance check and it will tell you where you have materials or spots on your site that are not accessible. There is also the PDF checker within Adobe Acrobat Professional and that s what has talking about. The idea is to build in as much accessibility as you can to your documents by using alt text and then headers and styles. Then you convert that document to a PDF and then you run the compliance checker within PDF. That s where it gives you a message telling you that you ve got a problem and you have to remediate it. That s the process., anything you want to add to that? No. I would just caution that if you run it through the PDF check and it says there are no problems, that doesn t always mean that it s an accessible PDF. Somebody just could have gone through and made everything an image and then wrote gobbledygook within the image and it still would say that it s accessible. People wouldn t do that but you have to make sure that your tag structure is correct. You do the check and then you do have to go in and look at the tags., are there any penalties to the Federal government for posting materials that are non-508- compliant? If we re not doing this who gets in trouble and what s trouble? Legal action can be taken against the agency that s not in compliance. Legal action can be taken against it. I am not sure that has happened yet. I think usually what happens and I know on some of the websites I ve worked on that somebody will complain to the agency and then the agency will complain to the people that made the file and then we scramble to fix it. There is a difference also. A quick difference I just learned is that Section 508 is not there were other laws. The Section 508 was a we ll do it first. It wasn t an adaptation. When somebody s staffed, they have to make sure there are going 16