2018 IT All-Campus Workshop - Accessibility Training Q & A

General Q & A

Will ITS provide training faculty and staff?

Yes, ITS will be coordinating various accessibility trainings on an ongoing basis. Further details will be made available through the Commitment to ADA Compliance page of the Accessibility at UH website.

Are we able to scan offline sites in development?

There are various free resources found on the Accessibility at UH Other Information and Resources page, however some resources cannot crawl or scan non-public sites.

Tools that were mentioned (Siteimprove, Adobe Acrobat Pro, Word Accessibility Checker) generate different results, is UH leaning towards one way?

ITS is continuing to evaluate accessibility scanning tools for various document types, and recommends that the provided accessibility checkers be used in applications that have them natively (e.g. Adobe Acrobat Pro, Microsoft Word, etc.). For document authoring programs without built-in or native accessibility checkers, ITS will publish on the Accessibility at UH site recommendations for scanning or accessibility checking tools as we identify and test them.

Specific to PDF files that are available through UH websites, Siteimprove does provide PDF scanning capabilities. While this provides a quick way to identify inaccessible PDF files on a UH website, the native accessibility checker available in Adobe Acrobat Pro should still be used to confirm document accessibility, as well as to remediate issues.

Videos and Images

Where would you embed captioning into the video?

You could do so on the website the video is hosted on. Upload the video to YouTube and make it private for the purposes of transcribing, then go back to edit the transcription. You can then export it out as a video file and delete the private video hosted on YouTube.

Things to note with video captioning:

  • Open-captioning will remain embedded in the video without the ability to turn it on/off
  • Closed-captioning can be turned on/off
  • YouTube has progressed in transcribing audio but it is always best to have a live person transcribing. One may initially use YouTube Creator and go back in to edit the audio transcription. There are also paid services like rev.com that can transcribe the audio portion of your video.
  • Captions should be done in the language spoken. The language used in the video should be reviewed by someone who is fluent in that language for accurate annunciation. For screen readers, it is best to have an accompanying text file.

Screen Readers

What does the screen reader read?

In terms of accessibility, a screen reader is a text to speech program and uses keystrokes to navigate websites and online documents.

Images: the screen reader will read the alt text assigned. It is always best that a link is provided for an image if hosted on an external site.

Hawaiian Diacritics: by assigning an ARIA-label, the screen reader will assign the diacritic mark as one word instead of looking at it separately. For example, Hawai&699;i will be read by a screen reader as Hawaii and not as two separate words. The screen reader may not annunciate it as well as a native speaker would, but it would forego accessibility issues arising from Hawaiian diacritical marks.

Alt Text: you may at times use a "decorative" item (repetitive logo, decorative toolbar or shape) that is meant only for visual effects to emphasize your document or website. In these instances where it may be deemed more of a decorative piece, you can bypass the screen reader options by creating a null statement or "" into the alt text field.

Documents & Spreadsheets

Docs will have a figure with a caption, how descriptive do the captions need to be?

While figure captions are important, it is more important to have data tables defined in a logical reading order. In Microsoft Word, this can be done by creating proper table headings. In Adobe Acrobat Pro, this can be assigned through editing the table and tagging it appropriately. If there are images, for example a graph of trend data, the trend data could be detailed in the alt text section of the image.

Tips on word processing documents:

  • Always use the style tools available in the authoring program to format the document such as titles, headings, text, lists (numbered or bulleted), data tables, charts, graphs and fonts.
  • Be sure to use structured headings. For example, using H2 without a preceding H1 will cause accessibility issues. Modifying the styles and creating a template are good habits to practice.
  • As much as possible, create a Table of Contents (TOC) as screen reader users are able to jump to different parts of your document.
  • Avoid all CAPs for headlines/titles as this causes accessibility issues with the coding surrounding capitalization.
  • PDF is better not only for the final accessibility checker capabilities but also easier for your users to open through Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (original authoring programs [Microsoft Word, Google Docs, etc.] are always best for initial accessibility features and easier to use).

Microsoft Excel flags spreadsheets that are merged amongst other accessibility issues, what do you recommend?

It is best to turn the spreadsheet data into a pdf to address the logical sequence order of the data you will provide online or in a document. Otherwise, one will have to go into the source code to identify the issue and remediate.