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00:01:21.140Welcome to the Accessibility Guy podcast. My name is Shawn Jordison, and in today's episode, I sit down and chat with Carolyn T. In this episode, we're going to talk about common accessibility failures, the use of templates, and how to help your organization get on track with accessibility. Let's jump into the ring. I have Carolyn with us here today, and Carolyn is a graphic designer with over 20 years of experience, who has pivoted into document accessibility consulting and remediation. Navigating the Title II deadline, she built her unit's document accessibility program from the ground up, including developing an SOP, creating accessible Word templates, and training staff on accessible document creation in Microsoft Word. Carolyn brings a unique perspective to the accessibility space as someone who has worked on both sides of the process, as a document creator and as a remediator, earlier this year she launched Document Accessibility by Design, a LinkedIn series of practical accessibility tips aimed at writers and content creators. Carolyn also has her own graphic design studio that serves clients across the United States. Welcome, Carolyn, and thank you for being here.
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00:01:23.808Thank you, Shawn. Happy to be here. Nice to see you.
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00:01:41.920Amazing. All right. So, a question that I want to ask you to kick this off is: How did you first get involved in accessibility, and do you feel like your background as a graphic designer kind of help shape that experience.
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00:02:05.209I was hired as a contractor to be a graphic designer for a government agency, and this was a few months before the original Title II deadline. And pretty much on my first day there, we discussed how this deadline was coming up, and nobody was really sure what to do, how to handle it. Did I have any experience with this?
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00:02:12.425And I had had a bit of experience because as a graphic designer, I had designed some things before that you know had to meet accessibility standards.
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00:02:51.560I was never the remediator, so I got to kind of do the upfront stuff and pass it off. But then I decided, you know what? This a new skill, and I never turned down learning a new skill. So I thought, I'm just gonna do a deep dive. I'm gonna figure out what to do. So I watched every webinar I could watch, including yours. I watched every YouTube video I could watch, including yours, and I read. I read all the guidelines. I, you know, I just was trying to learn as much as I could about accessibility, and my role pretty much pivoted.
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00:03:14.705I haven't done any design since since I've been there because the accessibility was a big deal. So that's all that I do now. So I mostly am remediating publications, but I do also train. I did an SOP, like you mentioned. I have checklists for people. I do one-on-one training sessions. I make accessible templates. I answer questions.
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00:03:15.574All the things.
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00:03:58.555I love it. I love it. Be careful. That's how you end up with your own accessibility business. That's a a lot of a lot of similar services, and I mean that in the best way because like that's what happens, right? I've definitely experienced that as well, where you know, or I've heard of other individuals where they start to learn this knowledge, and next thing you know, they are the accessibility champion in their organization, and that's that's what I'm hearing you say is you you accidentally became an accessibility champion for your org, and kudos to you. I think that's awesome, and you know I think graphic design is kind of like riding a bike. You probably never forget it, or what do they say about riding a bike? Like you never forget it once you learn.
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00:03:58.884Correct.
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00:04:11.169Whereas like accessibility, not that there's not more to learn with graphic design. I don't mean to say that, but with accessibility, it's like constant. It feels like stuff that you could pick up.
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00:04:18.839Well, guidelines change, technology changes, your own organization's needs change.
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00:04:40.519So you're right. I mean, it is always evolving. And to answer your other question, I definitely do think that being a designer helped me, just because I had, you know, I'm familiar with the styles palette, for example. I'm familiar with having to use hierarchy in my documents. A lot of that already made sense to me, so it was just kind of taking that and applying it. What I would normally see in like InDesign, for example, moving it over to what a tag tree looks like in Acrobat.
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00:05:03.529That makes perfect sense. There's definitely overlap with graphic design, and then there's also instructional designers. There's so much overlap there with accessibility, but it's interesting to know that like being a graphic designer kind of gave you a little bit of the knowledge and skills, and even an entryway, if you will, to get into accessibility, that's an interesting pathway, I think.
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00:05:24.694Yeah. So you had mentioned you stepped into a state government entity that didn't really have a formal accessibility plan. What did you see when you first started, and where did you decide to begin in that process?
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00:05:35.970Well, first, I just want to say I don't think they were alone. I think there's a lot of people who were kind of floundering toward the deadline, and thank goodness it was extended for everybody, right?
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00:06:18.689Because now people can have a little bit of breathing room, and they can assess. I think at the last minute, people realized what a big deal it was going to be, so now people have one extra year for governments of 50,000 or more constituents to get their accessibility plan together. And so what I thought was a good first step was I just made this 40-page training manual. Most of the documents that we do are in Word, so I made it specific to Word. I'm on a Mac. Everyone else is on a PC, so that was a little bit of a learning curve for me. And just basically went through how I thought someone would organize a document from start to finish.
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00:07:06.149So in order, you know, this is how you set up your document properties. Here's how you set up your headings. Here's how you set up your styles. Here's how you would do a chart. And I just went through in order of what I thought people would use, and described in each section the accessibility aspect of the thing that I was talking about, how to meet the guidelines, and then I conducted some unit-wide training sessions just like this, and people could ask questions. I did two of them, and then I worked with people individually who were in the midst of creating documents since they were the first ones to do it. Who doesn't love an SOP?
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00:07:09.810Yeah, right.
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00:07:59.189Like especially a good one. I've got staff members on my team that help me write SOPs, but we've got such a good process down. I just like hit record, record a video, and then they help me write it out in Google Docs, and then we have a reference video. It's super duper handy, and in fact, that's how my YouTube channel kind of started. Not in that, but as a faculty member, when I was doing that, I would get the same questions every other day, it felt like. But I love that you took that initiative to really jump in there, and it goes to show you know who you are as a person and really like being that champion. I think, I think to get that moniker, you have to carry that flag into battle, and that is sort of what that means, right? It's getting in there where no one else is willing to, doing the hard work. Like no one's gonna write that guide, and I suspect you know you probably didn't get paid extra for it. You know what I mean?
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00:08:17.115Like I suspect you did it because you thought it was the right thing to do, and I love that. So you taught yourself document accessibility from the ground up. I have to ask, what was the hardest part of that learning process? Like thinking back to that time when maybe you were just getting started, what was the hardest part?
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00:08:29.480You know, I think in the very very beginning, I'm remembering maybe the first document I ever remediated. I remember making a mistake that now I know was stupid, but at the time I didn't know because I was new, right?
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00:08:31.279What was it? Do you remember?
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00:08:52.870I remember exactly what it was. I was doing, I think, the table of contents or reference list or something, and I saw this one little tag, and I remember thinking, Oh, I don't actually need that because I'm gonna whatever. I'm gonna get it to say this in some other way.
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00:09:29.080And I deleted it. That caused me to get errors later. What I should have done was artifact it and then delete the empty tag that was above it. And I figured that out later. So I'm very, and I was able to go back and fix it, don't worry. The document was perfect when I was done with it. But I realized, oh, you know what? There's really an order to these things. There's a logic, and the logic is maybe not the same as what my intuition is telling me to do. So let me really think about this and be organized. And what is the order of events that I have to do in this tag tree, and now I know how to do that. So, but I think in the beginning I was a little more like, oh, I don't need this. I'll just delete it.
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00:09:30.460That's not always the right choice.
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00:09:45.690Yeah, yeah. It creates a game of I always call it whack-a-mole, where you you do one action and it causes another problem. Yes, and that is a classic one for sure, and it depends on the level of compliance you're going for.
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00:10:13.365What's really interesting about it, and I don't want to geek talk too much, but, even doing that deletion, a lot of times the screen reader experience still works accurately, which is sometimes frustrating in this field where we have these compliance checks, right? We have to do X, Y, Z. We need a passing report. Our boss wants it, and there's all these hoops we have to jump through in order to get to pass all those checks.
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00:10:42.495And I'll be honest, a lot of them have no bearing on certain disability types. Now, I'm not one to advocate for cutting corners in any way. I think it's very important that we make our documents accessible to the greatest extent. But that's definitely one of those issues where I'm like, it sucks that it's such a problem that you can't just delete a tag. And to Carolyn's point, the process you actually have to follow directly is you expand the child's or the tag structure all the way out.
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00:10:53.264You have to grab the child container element, even if it's a blank, empty space. You right-click it, artifact it, then you can delete the tag.
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00:11:03.225Because if not, what you'll get is tagged content not tagged or content not tagged error in the PAC tool. Anyways, I digress. I totally understand that problem.
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00:11:11.129So, to follow up on that, like you teaching yourself this, what did you feel like the hardest part of the learning process was?
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00:11:37.085Let me think about that because I feel like there were a couple. I feel like there were a couple tricky things. You know, I think for a while I was a bit scared to alter the tag tree, and something that I learned from you actually from your videos because you're so advanced. You're moving much quicker than I was at that time.
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00:12:54.799You know, you're cutting, you're pasting, you're moving, and I thought it was so scary to do that. And it's not. And a lot of times, it's completely necessary. For example, if a Word file wasn't set up correctly. Recently I had this list that was like six levels deep nested. It wasn't tagged at all as a list. It was a wall of text. So I was manual - with the reading tool. You know, I was manually like, here's this, and then your tag tree gets so many levels deep, and you're like pushing it over this way and pushing it over this way, so you can see everything and make sure you're all aligned. And a lot of times, you do have to drag and drop and move things around to do what you know is right and to put things in the order that someone who is using Assistive Technology would need to hear things in, and you just have to be careful. You know, you can move things. The items are there, and they can be re-tagged if necessary. But part of remediation is working in that tag tree, and I think I used to be really afraid of it, but I save often. And if I'm doing something major, I do a Save as, and I save it as a different file. If I'm going to test something, if I get an error and I have to go back and test something, I'm not testing my real file. I'm testing my copied file.
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00:13:13.230I cannot agree more with that. I love that. And one note on the saving thing. So when you're in the tags panel and you go to right-click and do a new tag, do you know what button is right above new tag?
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00:13:13.230Auto tag document.
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00:13:14.159Oh my gosh!
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00:13:28.970Accidentally, I've done it in live demos before. Actually, I did it one of my YouTube videos. It was a longer form one. I decided to keep it, but it overwrote the entire document, and I had to start over. You know, especially if you're dealing with complex reading order. Yeah. Oh my goodness.
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00:13:32.210You know what? That's a UI issue. They should be separated a little bit.
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00:14:50.524That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's right there, and you know me. I am fast. It's a. It is a blessing and a curse. I appreciate that I move through stuff so quickly, and then other times I don't even realize I'm doing it because the truth is I have been doing this so long that you you just forget this is my I like to think this is the craft that I have mastered over the years and I have to tell you one of the things that got me to where I was super comfortable with it right flying in the tags panel, I use my arrow keys and Control X and Control V to paste. I had a project. This is actually what kind of birthed me being out on my own. I had a contract with a translation company, and we did every single COVID document that came out of California in 18 to 22 different languages. Now, this was like guidance from the governor's office on outdoor events, a restaurant, your gym. So you could imagine we're talking 10s of 1000s of pages, and this was I was it was just me at the time, and most of these pages had lists, and at the time there was this weird bug where if you had a list that spanned two pages in Microsoft Word, it would create two parent L tags.
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00:14:51.455You would get one on the first page, one on the second.
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00:14:52.139Yes.
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00:15:14.169The most efficient way to fix that was to take the list item from the second, right, and put it on the first page. List item, list parent tag, and anyways, I just got that was the project that made me a speedster in Acrobat because I had, I mean, I won't lie, I made good money on that.
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00:16:00.190It made me feel like I could do this as a business, but part of that was the work. So I was charging per page, so it was like as many pages as I could do. I would make more money, and it felt like an insurmountable amount of pages at the time. And so I literally was working 12-hour days. My hands hurt. I still remember it. I did it for a whole summer. And anyways, I just had to share that, for the audience, that's how I got good at it. And to your point, don't be afraid because you can fix it, right? I often try to encourage people to break your computer. Whether its, you know, testing your tags panel, downloading NVDA for screen reader testing, just tabbing around using your keyboard.
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00:16:09.504There's a lot of techniques you can do to to break your computer. Obviously, I don't mean literally, but for that accessibility testing. Anyways, I appreciate you letting me go down that rabbit hole there.
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00:17:02.695finding that the File, Save As method is more efficient at these elements. But if your list also contains a nested list of any kind, it will often break into the multiple items, so
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00:17:05.480And this was a nested inside a nested
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00:17:07.670Marushka dolls.
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00:17:28.750And actually, I'm going to change the SOP where I am because I just can't guarantee that everyone is using the exact same version of Word. And even though everyone is doing the File, Save As because that's what SOP says, I'm getting different results. And it just happened to me the other day where I spent a lot of time trying to organize footnotes.
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00:17:44.065Footnotes, and the link, there weren't automatic links. And I thought, what the heck is going on here? Did they make them wrong? And I went to the Word file, and they were made correctly. So I exported the Word file myself on my Mac, and everything came in properly.
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00:17:45.069Interesting.
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00:18:02.009So I'm going to change the SOP to where I'm just going to make the PDF because then at least they're all going to turn out the same, and I don't have to come up with a different plan of attack for remediating this document when it's the same issue, but the tags come in differently depending on who exported it,
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00:18:05.900100% And I wonder if they did it accurately. You could actually check.
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00:18:08.660They did. I went back and checked.
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00:18:13.700How how strange.
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00:18:33.575I know also, not that this is what's happening, but going from Microsoft Online, the desktop or the web-based version is not the same process. Like it does not have the same accessibility features. So yeah, it's very interesting. It has a lot to do with your operating system version of Word. Yeah.
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00:18:36.394Are you on Share Point at the time when you export it?
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00:18:44.075I mean, who knows? Stuff looks different when it's on Share Point or whatever, whatever software you guys are using, you know, so there's a lot of variables.
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00:18:45.154Yeah,
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00:18:50.555And so it's difficult to isolate a problem when you have so many variable variables.
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00:18:57.079So I'm trying to narrow down the variables to just my computer, and I'll just do the exporting because at least I know it will turn out the same way every time.
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00:19:04.920Yeah, like the consistency throughout. Now, so this is an unscripted question.
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00:19:14.910Like, here's one problem I can see with that, Carolyn, is you're accidentally creating a bottleneck or a barrier by being the person that it has to filter through. Now, I think that's a positive and a negative thing.
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00:19:23.865But something to consider is trying to find a solution for the outliers. So, I've worked with some larger organizations.
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00:20:12.555I'm not sure if I can mention them or not, but these are statewide entities that have up to 1000 employees. And what we found is sometimes the champion, and this is who I'm envisioning you as, right in front of a department or whatever, will be the only person that now does the accessibility work. So I just would like to caution you to be careful. Like I love it, be a champion, right? That's how I am as well. Just be careful that you don't accidentally carry the entire weight of that, you know, program or project just on your shoulder. Just my my advice to you, but in that same vein, I really appreciate and respect your ability to kind of take that on because a lot of people won't say yes to that.
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00:20:27.914They won't be like I'll do it, right? So I appreciate that. You had mentioned in your application that people sometimes see accessibility itself as a barrier. Now I have my own opinions on this, but I'd love to know why do you think that happens?
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00:20:58.346I think naturally people are nervous about change. And if they've been doing something the same way for a long time, I think it's just people's natural inclination to be a little bit nervous when we when we change something. And creating documents in a manner that lends itself to accessibility is different. It's extra work in the beginning because you have to figure out what you're doing. I do think the learning curve, you know, is quick in terms of - is it steep?
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00:21:10.104I mean, yes, I think it's steep, but it's also like you said earlier, it's like riding a bike. You figure it out, and then you have it figured out.
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00:21:42.743And if you understand the rationale behind, the reasons why we do these things, which is why I learned accessibility holistically, like I told you, without the assistance of AI or other software. It's because then I will know I'm getting an error message. I know what the error message is telling me, not necessarily just how to solve it. But for people who are authoring content, they're not used to it, and I think that's fair. I think that's a fair thing to be nervous about.
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00:21:57.949They're not used to having to design something for accessibility. So if it's a situation where you're teaching people how to set up their documents, so that remediation is easier later, and keep in mind not everything can be solved in remediation, right?
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00:22:26.128There are certain things that have to be correct in the source document. You know, I think they see it maybe as something that they're not comfortable doing because they don't they don't know how. They're a little nervous to change their routines. They're a little nervous to maybe do something incorrectly. So I have found it very helpful in my training sessions to have live documents.
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00:22:37.279I give people exercises, and then I say, you know, take the next 15 minutes. You can turn your cameras off, and then come back and then let's just open somebody's document and see how you did. Yeah, I just think people tend to learn better, myself included, by doing rather than hearing or reading. Actually, doing it, I think, is helpful, and that gives people the opportunity to ask questions live as they're seeing things.
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00:24:54.765I could not agree more. Yeah, and I almost look at that as like a smaller subset, even. Some people are lucky to only have some documents to work on. So I say this because I work with a lot of faculty across the U.S. primarily a lot of faculty in California. But what we find with them, in helping getting their course accessible, right? A little outside documents - so this circles back to the question of why do people feel like accessibility seems like a barrier? I would say from the people I work with, it's the sheer tsunami of information. So just like you said, right? They don't know where to begin. They're afraid of breaking stuff maybe. With these faculty, they have not only documents, they have videos that need closed captions. They have their core shells in their learning management system that must also be accessible. And so, what we see in the industry and training is like knowledge is half the battle, right? Kind of knowing what to do is step one. Then step two is you have to do it. Which, for some of these faculty where they have 16-week courses and they're teaching at four different colleges, we find that it's just, it's almost too much. And so my advice to anyone listening to this, that maybe feels overwhelming or feels afraid, is to start with the content you're working on today. Like another analogy I use: We're all on the sinking Titanic together, so let's get our life rafts out. And my life raft right now is in the work that I do today. Like any project I'm touching today, that's my advice. And slowly work backwards. Also, kind of understanding what needs to be done or not. We find a lot of our people are making documents accessible that - because they're posted online. You know, there are some resources that you can check out. We'll post them in the blog/video of this podcast, like a Title II decision tree. Do you even need to keep your PDF?
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00:25:00.585There are some specific rules that can help you dictate that.
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00:25:49.305Hey, really quick! I wanted to let you know that the Accessibility Guy now offers an entire suite of trainings for your organization. We can teach you how to make your Word documents accessible, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, the entire Google suite, alternate text, Canvas, and more. We also offer document remediation and professional accessibility consulting services. So, if your organization needs help with getting accessible, look no further. Check out the link below this video to find out how I can help get your team totally accessible. Now, let's get back to the show. So, my note here is you trained 50 staff members who started with very little accessibility knowledge. What helped you get people to understand and adopt new practices?
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00:27:18.295Maybe this will answer your question. When I go through a specific part of my training, let's say adding alt text to your graph, let's just say. I will give them the example of this is what is going to sound like to someone who is using Assistive Technology. And I'll tell them what that person's experience is going to be. No one was using the captions function of tables before, and so that's in my SOP to use the caption function. And when I would test things, I do NVDA testing. I have to. I'm on a Mac, so I have to log into a PC just to be able to do my screen reader testing. I could go back and give them that information and say it is so helpful because that person's going to hear a caption, and then it's going to say the caption, and then it's going to go on to the chart or whatever it is and read the alt text. And then it's going to move on to the text underneath it. It's so helpful for someone who maybe can't see what's going on and is hearing, for them to hear the words 'This is a caption'. So I would try to give them, you know, real-world examples of how that's actually helping the person who is using the Assistive Technology. And I think that just kind of made it a little more understandable why we should take that extra step.
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00:29:02.099I absolutely love that you said that because that is exactly what I used to do too. So prior to being The Accessibility Guy, right in my mind, I'm two people. Today I'm The accessibility Guy. But there was a time where I was much more a disability professional serving directly, people with disabilities. Today I kind of serve people that support people with disabilities, whereas in my previous roles, it was like that's all I did. We worked with students with acquired brain injuries, multiple disability types, the whole the whole gamut. And one of the biggest impacts we had was teaching or showing faculty what the screen reader sounds like, and it's an easy one, but there's other tests you can do. When we were in the classroom, you could try to simulate following directions from a video. So I one time had the privilege of working with a student who was legally deaf and blind, and we had a sign language interpreter who would touch sign. The student would verbalize, and it was a very unique accommodation process that we had. And at that time, the professor had a bunch of videos, but they weren't audio described. And I don't mean like the WCAG criteria audio description. We're talking - it was for a graphic design course, and the professor was like, "You're going to click over here, click this button, and then over to the left, you're going to select that". And it was a super long video, and this student is deaf blind, and so the directions mattered so much.
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00:29:07.289By the way, this student was so intelligent. He knew the entire hex color range -
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00:29:08.220Wow!
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00:29:10.944by memorization.
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00:29:30.895And I've never seen anyone navigate a laptop the way that this young man did. And he was able to create these images, moving images. I'm not familiar in that industry, like I can't speak on it. But essentially, it was like making a little movie by putting things on there, right? Like animation style.
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00:29:43.202Anyways, the student was able to do the assignment through this accommodation, but when we met with the faculty, the thing that stuck the most was, we want you to follow your own directions based on what you verbally said.
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00:30:14.425So kind of similar of like, let's let's frame this house up with why we're here, and it was a really fun experience. The professor was like, "Oh my gosh, I had no idea". You know, because a lot of times they don't even know that they're talking vaguely. Or, you know, there's a failure under color and meaning, or you know, you don't want to say look over there, look over here. You want to say select the File button, then select Save As, change the drop-down from Microsoft Word.
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00:30:16.499You've got to be very specific.
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00:30:34.119Well, if ever I made a form, the first thing I did when I was done with it, was print it out and fill it out myself. I mean, have you been at the doctor's office when you have to fill in your name, and they give you a space that's like this big? It's like, okay, well, nobody tested this themselves, clearly. So you always want to test your own stuff.
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00:30:55.059Yeah. Or my favorite, right? They ask you for all the documents, fill them all out. I got to enter my name and address 45 times, and then I get in the office and I have to do it again on paper. Yes, and I'm like, man, a little bit of logic in these forms from an accessibility lens would just-I mean, what would their staff do all day if not be entering this pointless data that they already collected?
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00:31:01.404On my interactive checklist, you enter your name once and it repeats everywhere else. I programmed it that way.
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00:31:09.835I love that. I love that. You got me really chatty here. I love it. I appreciate this conversation.
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00:31:12.805All right, you ready for the next question, Carolyn? How are you feeling so far?
00:31:12.779 -->
00:31:15.809I'm ready. I hope I have an answer.
00:31:15.809 -->
00:31:34.920Hey, you got this. You got this. So, if you had to frame some simple changes for document creators that would have the biggest impact on accessibility. What few simple changes would you recommend for people that are out here creating content?
00:31:34.930 -->
00:31:40.960Yes, so I'm going to speak to Word first because that's what I deal with most.
00:31:40.960 -->
00:31:58.194But you can extrapolate this into other software. Number one, fill in your metadata. Fill in the document properties. Fill in the document title. I think people maybe don't realize that your document title that you put in your document properties is different from your file name.
00:31:58.194 -->
00:32:21.819So when someone is using a screen reader, the first thing the screen reader reads out is your document title, the thing that you have entered in your document properties. There, that's also a place where you put the author, subject, keywords. That helps with SEO theoretically. That's part of my SOP to always fill that out and to always have the author be the organization that I work for.
00:32:21.819 -->
00:32:37.630The same thing, not a person's name because people are not always there. The organization's name-that's how we do it. And then the second thing would 100% be get comfortable using styles.
00:32:37.630 -->
00:32:54.234So headings first-you get six headings in Acrobat. For anyone who doesn't know, you can have up to six. There's heading seven. It's not going to get recognized, so you got to squeeze everything into six, which has been fine for me so far. And you don't have to use the heading style that Word has.
00:32:54.234 -->
00:33:22.960You can customize that for yourself. You just need to have it be the style called heading one, heading two, heading three, and then make styles for the rest of your document because sometimes it's even helpful if I happen to have someone on a video call. I'll just open up the tag tree, and I'll say you did this correctly in your Word file, and look what it turns into in Acrobat. Look how Acrobat knew. Acrobat knows everything. Okay, you can mask stuff in Word. You can hide it.
00:33:22.960 -->
00:33:49.884You can change it. It doesn't matter. Acrobat knows what it is, and it's helpful sometimes for people to see, you know, this the end result of what they're doing in Word, especially for things like tables. Nested lists is a big one. You know, headings wouldn't be the end of the world. I can go and change a document property here and there, but you know, think of your document like an outline that we all had to do when we were in school.
00:33:49.884 -->
00:34:02.289It's the same thing. You're organizing in that way. And for other file types, you're still going to want to fill in your document properties the same way. Screen reader is going to read out your document title, not your file name -
00:34:02.289 -->
00:34:03.009Yeah.
00:34:03.009 -->
00:34:13.000your document title. So you don't want your document title to be, thisisreallyfinalv2. That doesn't tell anybody anything.
00:34:13.000 -->
00:34:13.960You want it to be indicative of the content.
00:34:13.929 -->
00:34:59.005So the thing that got me to learn this the most was being a student. So as a student, you might have four or five PDFs open at any given time on your computer. As someone who's visually impaired, moving between those things, and you set it when you first open up the document, it reads the document title. So imagine having two articles open for your research project, and you have to flip between them. That is the perfect use case right there to ensure that you have the document title properly assigned, so that if you're switching between documents, maybe you're lucky and only have two, but if you have 10 or 15 tabs, it really becomes important to have that document title set. I could not agree more with your tips there. I think those are some great tips.
00:34:59.050 -->
00:35:07.960And I think that they're very, they're kind of low-hanging fruit, right? Those are very accessible, easy things that someone could start with.
00:35:07.960 -->
00:35:08.409Totally.
00:35:08.409 -->
00:35:32.034You know, the styles are already there in Word. You just alter them to be what you want, and you apply. That's not learning anything new. I think probably most people have used a style or two, maybe not correctly, but at least they're familiar with how to do it. And you know, the document properties is just a tab that you fill out. That's that's really those are two really easy things for people to start with.
00:35:32.809 -->
00:35:45.369So you had talked about creating some accessible templates and this SOP. That sounds amazing. Do you feel like they worked? Do you think that these tools changed the way that your organization approaches accessibility?
00:35:46.869 -->
00:36:25.405I 100% think that they work. The thing you need to be careful about is you could present someone with a template that is ideal in every way. If they don't know how to use the template, it's the same as not having a template at all, so it's really important that a training, for me, it's really important that a template and a training on how to use the template go hand in hand. I'm not in the business of just throwing templates out at people and assuming they're going to know how to use them. I wouldn't want someone to assume that just because they threw something at me, that I would know how to use it.
00:36:25.405 -->
00:36:25.554Yeah.
00:36:25.449 -->
00:36:37.360So I accompany my templates with a training session, and you know my goal is just to remove some of the work.
00:36:37.360 -->
00:36:44.559Just take - this is a phrase used in accessibility a lot: 'cognitive load'. I'm trying to remove some of that for people.
00:36:44.559 -->
00:37:09.295I don't need them to be working on the actual words of these documents, the content of these documents, the authoring of these documents, and then on top of that, have all this extra work to think about, just to prepare something for accessibility. I'm trying to build in as much as I can for them so that they have the least amount of work to do, but I'm still getting the result that I need to be able to remediate documents cleanly and quickly.
00:37:09.295 -->
00:37:19.119I love that. I find that most Word templates, so the technique that I follow, we do a template and then I do a video.
00:37:19.119 -->
00:37:19.750Yes
00:37:19.750 -->
00:37:37.644And we typically will link the video in the template, and then we try to put some like monikers in there of like 'delete me'. But it takes a special person to be able to follow a Microsoft Word template because you know what's the easiest way to ruin a template?
00:37:37.644 -->
00:37:37.644Copy paste.
00:37:37.644 -->
00:37:37.914Yeah.
00:37:37.929 -->
00:38:11.275It will, it will nuke it, you know? So I love that you pair it with a training, and I think more organizations should offer that supporting cast of things. Like I've had clients pay me to make templates, and I'm like, I'll do it, but it's, you know, you should know that it has to be followed perfectly, or else there's no point. However, one organization that I really appreciate-I can't-I can't mention them-but for templates, we actually took a unique approach. We pretty much turned everything into a fillable form.
00:38:11.275 -->
00:39:01.974And so instead of it being a template in Word - they needed to change date. This was actually, we were working on a lunch menu, and we found the best way to templatize it was to make it a fillable form. And we added the parts that were templatized as a fillable form, and that was like a way that we worked around people being able to overwrite. Now it's not perfect, and there's still, there's its own considerations with it, but I was just curious if you felt like, and I knew you were gonna say yes, but like you felt like that energy you put into it really changed things because I think more organizations need to spend time on this. They need to look at developing an SOP, a process their people to follow. Because if you have 100 cooks in the kitchen, like you're gonna get 100 different dishes unless there is a process. And yeah.
00:39:01.974 -->
00:39:02.755Anyways.
00:39:02.750 -->
00:39:10.190And you just need to be able to offer ongoing support because just because I had this training session doesn't mean everyone happened to be in the office that day, or -
00:39:10.190 -->
00:39:11.000Yeah, right, right.
00:39:11.000 -->
00:39:14.059you know, happened to be able to stay the entire time.
00:39:14.059 -->
00:39:31.610Like, I don't know that, so that's why you have to offer multiple. And something that I'm actually considering offering, if I'm able to do it, is like a little, maybe lunch-and-learn series. You know, like 20 minutes, very topic specific.
00:39:31.610 -->
00:39:33.980You know, and it could start with here's how to use headings.
00:39:33.980 -->
00:40:06.889Let's everyone try to make a heading. Do it yourself. Come back. Let's just see. Like a little micro tutorial. Because every little step that you can add is getting you closer to accessibility. Though I don't want people to think of it as I have 455 things to do and I need to do them all at the same time immediately. That is impossible for anyone. You have to, you have to take steps. So if they're baby steps, great. It's still a step in the right direction.
00:40:06.889 -->
00:40:23.135I love that. I love that. Do you feel like you spend more time helping people understand about removing barriers, or do you find that you're helping them meet WCAG and PDFUA compliance. Just curious.
00:40:23.000 -->
00:40:48.755Well, this is kind of a sticking point for me personally because I, and I've written about this in my LinkedIn series. I know people love a checklist. They would love do these 10 things, but you know, accessibility is very situationally dependent, right?
00:40:48.755 -->
00:41:17.659And not everything fits into a checklist. And I'm sure you've experienced this. I've experienced it many times when you have a document, it passes whatever checker it is you're using, and it's not actually accessible to the end user. So I like to, I like to go through when it's someone's first time giving me a document. I like to go through it with them.
00:41:17.659 -->
00:42:29.525Actually, we share a screen and we just flip through, and I point out what what do I see here. Is that actually a caption? Can we put it in the caption? Did you definitely make that list using the tool? Is that table of contents? Did you use the table of contents creator in Word? Could I? Could you just click on this? Can I just see that real quick? And I'll look at things like their charts. I think something that people have a hard time grasping is the whole don't allow color to be the only thing that's differentiating your value sets in a chart. I think that's hard for people to work around. So then I say, you know, if someone is colorblind, if someone is printing in black and white, they have to be able to differentiate this. This legend is meaningless to someone if all of your bars are solid, you know we need to use a pattern. We need to put the label right on top of the bar, something, and don't forget you need a paragraph underneath it describing everything that's in there for someone who maybe couldn't see it. So I just like to give the - I don't like to just say 'well this wouldn't pass because of X'. I like to say 'here's what we can do', and the result it would have on someone who is using Assistive Technology.
00:42:29.539 -->
00:42:44.239I love that. I love that, and I teach the same way. I just had to ask, like, because you get a lot of people that show up, they're like, we just want this document to pass, and I'm like, okay, but that's - we can do that, but it's kind of the wrong approach.
00:42:44.239 -->
00:42:58.175Which is also why I advocate for not running the accessibility checker until you've done all of the stuff. The built-in accessibility checker for the Microsoft and Adobe products do not align or adhere to any accessibility standard or law.
00:42:58.175 -->
00:43:09.034Therefore, they should be used in conjunction with all of our manual efforts that we put in there, and and why are we doing this stuff? It's to help our end user. So, Carolyn, you and I are kindred spirits, my friend.
00:43:09.034 -->
00:43:12.244Everything you're talking about, I'm like, that's exactly what I would do too.
00:43:12.989 -->
00:43:26.579And you know what? I don't think a lot of people realize that those checkers do not align with WCAG or PDFUA guidelines. I don't think they understand, and that is completely fine. I understand why they don't understand. This isn't what they do. I completely get it.
00:43:26.579 -->
00:43:40.815I find, you know, most of what makes me feel useful when I'm out doing a training, it's these tidbits of information. Like people are like, "What? I had no idea. I've been doing this wrong my whole career", and I'm like, "Well, let's start today", you know.
00:43:40.815 -->
00:43:49.425And then I introduce the PAC tool, and it's like, "oh no!", you know. You might as well be trying to teach hieroglyphics or something. It just depends on the person, but interesting.
00:43:49.425 -->
00:43:49.425Yeah.
00:43:49.425 -->
00:43:51.974And something else I think people don't realize.
00:43:51.974 -->
00:44:00.750Well, first of all, let me just go back and say that passing a Microsoft Word accessibility checker and passing an Acrobat accessibility checker, it's a pretty low bar. Okay.
00:44:00.780 -->
00:44:01.050Totally.
00:44:01.110 -->
00:44:05.699It's a pretty low bar.
00:44:05.699 -->
00:44:12.840I know for sure that I have had people send me documents that have passed the Acrobat Accessibility Checker, and just sometimes for fun, I just throw them into PAC just before I do anything, just to see.
00:44:13.260 -->
00:44:13.440Yeah.
00:44:13.440 -->
00:44:15.630And it's like triple digit errors.
00:44:15.630 -->
00:44:15.900Oh yeah.
00:44:15.900 -->
00:44:28.019But it passed the Acrobat Checker. So if you end there, you're really missing out on an opportunity to make your document a lot more accessible.
00:44:28.019 -->
00:45:20.639And I think another thing that most people don't realize, you know, kind of like they don't realize that the Acrobat Accessibility Checker isn't tied to WCAG or anything. Screen readers are not reading your document; they're reading your tags. The screen reader is not looking at your paragraph and reading. It's reading what's in the tag tree over here. And I think that's actually a really interesting concept for people to grasp. That's why it's so important what you're doing over here, that everything is labeled properly. If this is a list item, make sure it has a label and an L body. If it's a heading, make sure it has an h2 tag, whatever it is, because the screen reader -your pages, I mean, you wouldn't get the tags without them. But if your pages were blank and you still were able to have a tag tree, it would still read what was on those pages before. It's going by the tags. So I think that's a concept that most people may not know.
00:45:20.639 -->
00:45:41.474One of my, one of my favorite things to just talk about, that is, I like to, so when I'm doing training, right, accessibility, let's be honest, it's - I love it - not everybody loves it with the same enthusiasm, right? You love it, but let's be honest, it can be dry, right? There's, it's kind of boring, so in my trainings, are you familiar with updating actual text?
00:45:41.474 -->
00:45:43.335Yes I use that a lot, actually.
00:45:43.389 -->
00:46:43.300Okay, so for those of you unaware, let's say there's an acronym USA in my PDF. You can update what's called the actual text property to have it spelled out United States of America or whatever else it might be, because USA could stand for lots of different things. I always like to put in there like I'm a banana, and then I test it with a screen reader because you know it could be all super serious, and we're testing. And then I'm like, now let's listen to what this says and how easy it is to manipulate what the screen reader actually reads. And don't even get me started on Adobe Read Aloud or these tools that are not screen readers. This is probably another conversation for another time. But there is a big difference between a text-to-speech technology and a screen reader. And a lot of people, when they when they reach out to me or they leave comments on YouTube, they're they're talking about the wrong tool, unfortunately. And like the read aloud feature does read the text off the page and not the tags, but it is not a Assistive Technology tool.
00:46:43.300 -->
00:46:59.155Therefore, it's not the same learner experience. What is something that you would tell somebody new to the industry of accessibility? Let's say I'm just getting in, or I want to get started. What's something you would tell me?
00:47:00.079 -->
00:47:44.824I think I would say that there is a lot to learn, but I think it's a very satisfying thing to do to be able to work on documents, websites, whatever kind of accessibility you're working on, to know that you're helping someone who is really relying on these tools. So I like to always remind people, yes, I'm making this PDF accessible. Yeah, it's great that it's passing all the checkers, but there's a human being here who needs that Assistive Technology at the end, and they deserve the same access to all the information that everyone else is getting. So I really like that you've coined that accessibility champion because the phrase that I've heard a lot is accessibility advocate, but champion is way better. So I think we need to.
00:47:44.824 -->
00:47:52.699I definitely, I definitely can't take credit. I don't know where I heard it from, but yeah, I there's lots of names, but I feel you.
00:47:53.469 -->
00:47:53.980I like champion.
00:47:54.550 -->
00:48:08.369All right, my final official question for you is: What's something you wish you would have known when you started your accessibility journey. Knowing what you know now, what do you think would have maybe had the greatest impact? Like when you were starting.
00:48:10.679 -->
00:48:35.324Oh my gosh, I really need to think about that. I'm trying to think back to when I first started learning everything. I think maybe just how everything that we do, accessibility-wise, is related to something else. Nothing really exists in a vacuum. So something that you're doing here is going to affect something in a lot of other places, and it can really be a group effort.
00:48:35.324 -->
00:48:53.715You know, there can be an accessibility champion, that's true. But people involved in all aspects of the process, you know you're going to get a better result if everybody's working together and if everybody's on the same page, and it can be a group effort. I think you'll get a better result that way.
00:48:53.719 -->
00:48:57.170I totally agree.
00:48:57.170 -->
00:49:16.355Yeah, the champion idea is like, you know, it does take that one person to kind of carry the weight sometimes, but I could not agree more. Like, a champion also shares knowledge. Yes, they help others become champions as well, or comfortable to not be afraid to to get in the ring of accessibility, if you will.
00:49:16.355 -->
00:49:16.355Yeah, I love that you said that.
00:49:16.355 -->
00:49:22.625Well, Carolyn, thank you so much for joining us here today on The Accessibility Guy podcast. I really appreciate your time.
00:49:23.059 -->
00:49:27.289Well, thank you so much for having me on. It was really great to talk to you, and congratulations on the podcast.
00:49:28.039 -->
00:49:45.760Thank you so much, Carolyn. Thank you so much for joining me in today's podcast episode. I hope you learned as much as I did. If you would like to be a guest on this show, check out the link below this video to find the application. And as always, I could be your champion for inclusion. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I'll see you over in the next video.
