Must-have accessibility tools

- [Instructor] Checking for accessibility is fast and easy with the right tools. Just remember that even the best tools can't replace you, you are ultimately the one responsible for checking your presentation. With that said, PowerPoint's built-in Accessibility Checker is a good place to start, checking your presentation while you are working in PowerPoint and when you are done with your slides. So let's jump over to PowerPoint and check that out. To follow along with this video, open up the exercise file called 01_05__accessibility_start. Now, this file has not been 100% checked for accessibility, so we're going to continue that job right now. To check for a presentation's accessibility using PowerPoint's Accessibility Checker, the simplest way on your PC is to simply use the Accessibility icon on the status bar. So going all the way down here, hover your mouse over this icon here. It looks like a little person with an X over it, or sometimes it might have a little check mark, depends on if there are issues found. Click on that and that will launch the Accessibility Checker on the right-hand side of your screen. If for some reason you can't see your status bar at the very bottom of the PowerPoint window, you can always launch the Accessibility Checker by going up to your Review tab and clicking that Check Accessibility button, either way will work. But with the Accessibility Checker open, you will see the inspection results appear with several types of errors. Now, how they label the inspection results, that may be different. They're always updating how they label these inspection results. But right now, I have errors, I have warnings, and I have a tip down below. And at the very top, under Errors, I have Missing Object Description, four, Missing Table Header, and Missing Slide Titles. Clicking on any one of these options, that will bring up a list of all of those objects that are missing descriptions. And this is the really handy thing about this Accessibility pane. I can jump to any one of these objects very quickly by taking my mouse, clicking right on top of it, and I will see a list of recommended actions. Right from here, I can go ahead and add a description or mark that object or that picture as decorative. So here on slide one, it's selecting this picture, which is that background image. That is a decorative option, so I'm just going to mark that right here as decorative. Now we can very quickly jump to the next missing object description, which is rectangle two on slide two. Now let's examine the slide a little bit more closely. On this slide, this is kind of interesting, we have two of the same object, yet one object and one object alone is flagged as missing its object description. Let's explore this a little bit more, let's open up the Alt Text pane for that. No alt text here, so maybe someone just forgot it for this one, but not for this one. Well, let's click here. Ah, no alt text for this object either. Well, why is our Accessibility Checker flagging it for this box, but not this one. Well, something that neither of us can see at a glance lies in how these objects were created. This rectangle box has the text typed right into it, whereas this one, someone placed the text box over the object. So PowerPoint, obviously, these are two different objects, a text box on top of the rectangle, whereas this one, this has the text typed into it. So even though there isn't any alt text typed into it, PowerPoint considers this or will use this for the screen reader. So alt text isn't really necessary, and that's why it's not flagging it in the Accessibility Checker. So I just wanted to point out those differences for you with this slide. I know a lot of people like to layer text boxes on top of objects, that will create additional work for you. So in that case, we could do this a couple of ways. We could create alt text for this, or simply mark this object as decorative. Now, since we're on this slide, let's jump down to this option here. This warning, Hard-to-Read Text Contrast, slide two. Also with this rectangle, it is marking this one as hard-to-read text contrast, but not this one. The Accessibility Checker in PowerPoint is not able to check the color contrast of different objects, only the same object. So since the text is typed into this box, it can check to see if the contrast is strong enough. But because this is a different object placed on top of it, it considers it two different objects and will not be able to see if there's enough contrast between these two different objects, that you'll manually have to check yourself. That goes for text boxes placed on top of things, like shapes, and for placeholders placed on top of pictures and slide backgrounds. So this slide here, this was created using Designer. This, there's no way this would pass any accessibility check, and Designer created it for us. Just wanted to point that out too. Another thing that the Accessibility Checker will check, it's going to look for table headers, so let's jump to table two on slide seven. And looking at this, just glancing at this table, it looks like there's a table header. I mean, just looking at it, we have a top row, where the top row is in a darker font. It's boldface compared to the rest of them, so it kind of looks like a table header, but according to PowerPoint it's not. Also, according to screen readers, this is not a header. In order to have a real header row, you have to select the option Header Row from that Table Design tab in PowerPoint. In the last movie, we talked about how to insert alt text. Well, here is an image that was inserted from stock images on the computer. And going up to Picture Format and clicking on Alt Text, it contains the text, woman using laptop computer on bed. Now, this is the alt text that is inserted from the stock images site in Office. It comes with the image. But depending on your presentation, that alt text might not be suitable for the content of your message. Let's say I'm presenting on internet safety in cyber scams aimed at the elderly. If I'm using this image to show that the woman is unaware that her computer is infected, I'm going to need to edit this alt text to reflect the content of my presentation. So the moral of the story is that you need to check all your images in your presentation, even those not flagged by the Accessibility Checker. You want to make sure your alt text matches the content on your slides. And one more thing to point out. Let's jump over to slide number four, here we have a chart. And on the Accessibility tab, we have this wonderful button here, Inspect Without Color. Now, glancing at this chart, kind of hard to tell the difference between the lines in the chart, for chocolate chip, peanut butter, and sugar. And remember, one of those guidelines was to say, make sure that color isn't the only means for communicating information. And that's kind of what this chart is doing. So with charts, it's best to not rely on color alone or a key like this, but to direct-label your chart. So in this case, I would grab-hold of this data point, and instead, I would go to Data Labels, I would add that. And instead of that number, the number 6,000 displayed there, I would go down to More Options. And instead of the Value, I would add the Series Name, move the Value, and I would probably place this to the right of that line. And that's how you direct-label things on your chart. Just grab that point, hit that plus, Data Labels, More Options, click on Label Options, add that Series Name, uncheck Value, and then change the position, make sure it's facing right. And that's a much better way. Regardless of color, even if the colors do work, I think direct-labeling is better. But yeah, that's one more thing that the Accessibility Checker is not going to check for. It's not going to flag that you can't tell the difference in colors between a chart, it's not going to flag it. That's something you've got to eyeball yourself by inspecting without color, using this tool right here. So yes, the Accessibility Checker is great to start, or you're going to need to do some work on your own as well. And on that note, there are some rules for the Accessibility Checker that you can read about on the Microsoft Support page. Do look up that article, it will give you all the ins and outs of the Accessibility Checker as well as the Accessibility Checker limitations.