Best Practices in Developing and Disseminating Documents Electronically

JANET PETERS

I believe we''ll get going. We have a lot to cover today. I would like to welcome everyone to the 2010 Accessible Technology Webinar series. I''m Janet Peters, the Coordinator of Education and Assistive Technology at the Great Lakes Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Center. The webinar series is sponsored by the Great Lakes ADA Center and Pacific ADA Center, both members of the ADA National Network. Before we jump into our series today, our speaker, just a couple of logistics. This program is one hour, so we''ll be wrapping up by 2:00 p.m. There will be question time at the end for question and answer. At that point, we''re going to hold the questions till the end, and at that point you can either type your question into the public chat area or go ahead and use your microphone and voice your question. And this session is being recorded, and it will be archived. So you will receive an e mail link when that is available with the archive session. In addition, there will be an evaluation survey that we would like you to fill out, and the handouts will be sent with that evaluation survey. I''m very pleased that you have all taken time today to join us, and I''m excited about our speaker. Our speaker is Neal Albritton and he''ll be talking to us about best practices in developing and disseminating documents electronically. Neal has been referred to as the Section 508 guru, best known for work in web accessibility as national consultant, web designer and through his contribution to the State of California Implementation of Section 508 Web Accessibility Standards. He is currently the chief executive officer of the ADCS LLC, which he''ll tell you more about, and Section508guru.com. He is the citywide ADA coordinator for the City of Sacramento, California, and the vice president of the ADA Professionals and member of California Association of Equal Rights Professionals. In 2009 through a grant through the Department of Rehab and Alliance identify technology access; Neal authored the accessibility checklist, a document outlining best practices for organizations to create accessible alternative formats, strong communications and collaborative tools. He continues to deliver workshops, on technical topics, design, accessible websites and other accessibility topics. We''re very pleased to have him with us today, and with that, I''ll turn it over to Neal to get started with our program.

NEAL ALBRITTON

I want to welcome everyone and thank you for joining. We have quite a bit of information to go through in the next hour, and before we get started, I would just like to let you know that I made these slides very detailed so that if you access this at a later date, you''ll have all the details to work with. So this should be very helpful for you. And moving along, so what we''re going to talk today about is the best practices in developing and disseminating documents electronically. I''ve been doing this probably the last ten years now, and throughout that time, I''ve been fortunate enough to find a lot of shortcuts and a lot of various means by which to create accessible content and to share that information with others, which this presentation should capture and prove effective for you in the work that you do. So what I would like to do first is start off with a simple question for you, something to ponder here. Who among you would you consider are content creators? When I say content creators, have you created a website; digital documents; print media; E mail; or listservs; written on any blogs; Forums; or contributed to any RSS feeds? Ask yourself that question and if you answered yes to either one of those, then this presentation is for you because you are, by default, a content creator. We create digital content for several types of consumers. Those that will be using our information include employees, people of the public, customers, contractors, folks in human resources, legal professionals, state and local and federal governments, and for job applicants, just to name a few. There''s much more beyond that, but that''s just to give you an insight. The question to this is that of those folks receiving this digital content is everybody able to access the information effectively by default the way that it is delivered to the public? Namely that when you create content, is the content when it''s developed taking into account the needs of the people with disabilities, people with hearing disabilities, maybe somebody who''s deaf, hard of hearing, often times people who are aging. People that have sensory disabilities, folks that are blind, low vision, again, aging. Motor related disabilities include paralysis, MDTs and may affect those aging as well. Then there''s cognitive disabilities to take into consideration that may include learning disabilities, people that have experienced traumatic brain injuries and folks with dyslexia. As our population ages, it''s really important to know that many of those individuals are going to experience one or more of the functional limitations that we''re talking about, and many of those are people who are going to be our audience, people who are going to be receiving the contents that you create. Now, to protect the civil rights of people with disabilities so that we all benefit, there are federal, state and local laws that are in existence that are in force. And ignoring these laws has proven to be very costly error to some, even if it was unintentional. So we''ll go over these slides in more specifics, but I just wanted to go and touch base to those that apply for us here in California. We have the California Government Code 11135. We have Section 508 of the rehabilitation act of 1973, which was amended. We have the Americans with Disabilities Act title I that applies to us. Again for folks in California, we have the California Unruh Civil Rights Act. Now, there aren''t very many people on here likely to be out of California, and for those of you outside of California, many states do have equal civil rights laws as well. California just happens to be one of those states that our laws offer sometimes and quite often greater protections than the federal laws do. Let’s start off by seeing which of the laws apply. I started out with California Government Code 11135. Yes, it does apply to us in California. If your entity''s program or activity is conducted, operated, by any state agency or funded directly by the state or receive any financial assistance from the state of California, this applies. Other tips to watch for those people that are outside of California, if you''re doing business with the state of California, then again, these laws may impact you and it''s something you should be aware of. We have Section 508 of the rehabilitation act of 1973. This impacts the content if your entity receives federal funds or is a California state government agency or department, or if you receive state funds or contract with the state of California. That''s a very important catch right there is that if you are contracting with the state of California, either from within California or from outside, your content still needs to be accessible and comply with these laws and be accessible to people with disabilities. To check on federal laws that comply, Americans with Disabilities Act Title I regarding employment. If you are a private employer, state or local government, employment agencies or part of a labor union, the content you create needs to be accessible. Going back to California we have the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, which applies to all California businesses including but not limited to hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, hospitals, barber and beauty shops, housing accommodations, public agencies and retail establishments. It''s a very broad law that protects those rights of people with disabilities as well but is often overlooked. This again is one of those laws we should take into consideration and that we should be aware of whenever conducting business with California. So in addition to these laws that we have, the laws impact the content that we create. So we have certain issues that we''re going to talk about that we definitely need to be concerned about. The issues of the content we create that we want to address specifically relate to adobe PDF files, portable document format files, Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, and Microsoft Word documents. These are the most common formats for digital documents. To be accessible, they must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Those are key points that I''ll explain here shortly. As content creators, we show that our employees have access to programs and services. Four principles that we just mentioned, I''m going to start off with the first one that we need to take into consideration. Whenever we create electronic content, we need to make sure that it''s, first of all, perceivable. Your digital documents must be perceivable, visible, to any person even if they''re a blind user or with low vision. That''s fairly basic. Sometimes, again, the lack of awareness exists so that people don''t take that into account and we have issues with accessibility again that I''ll go into greater detail. The second principle to take into consideration regards ratability. Digital content must be operable so that user can perform the necessary interactions with it. This most often involves velocities interactive forms and navigation. People with disabilities often use technologies to engage with, interact with, and use electronic content. Such things as screen reader technology such as jaws, refreshable Braille, which looks like a keyboard and has a pin set change as words are being translated from the media being read so as the person that uses the refreshable Braille technology as they move their mouse or tab over, the content is appearing on the keys as Braille. So those are some things we need to take into account when we are designing documents and forms so that navigation can be operable, whether or not somebody has a disability. The third principle is that all content needs to be understandable. Information presented must be understandable by those attempting to use the information. That is why it is important to anticipate user interaction. So when you''re creating content and designing content, think about the people who may have access to it. Are your customers all people that have vision, or is there a chance that some of them may have low vision? Is there a chance that the documents that you create or the surveys that you send out to someone with a disability equal to what we were just talking about may need to access that information? That information, then, is very important that it''s understandable. That''s why we need to target our users so we can include people with learning disabilities and people with cognitive limitations when we talk about understandability. Sorry about that, I just lost it here. Bear with me one moment. So the last principle we need to take into consideration is robustness. This needs to be designed for presentation of people with disabilities using different, current and future assistive technologies. When we design content and websites, we need to take into account that technology is not going to be the same as they are tomorrow. Technology is constantly evolving and advancing. When we do that and design websites and different types of visual media, you need to understand that, so when we design our websites, for example, instead of using HTML, we design it in XHTML code which is accessibility for current technology, it''s backwards compatible and future compatible. These are some of the things we need to take into consideration. So robustness in our documents is very important. Now we''ll talk about some best practices. We''ll talk about best practices for creating PDF documents, Word documents, and PowerPoint documents. The reason I bring this is up is that many of us are creating these different formats, and just to give you some idea as far as the scope of what we''re talking about, I did a Google search this morning and looked at the different kinds of content which is already archived on the web. And till 9:30 this morning I looked to see how many PDF documents we have on the web and there''s over 1 billion that are online. We have when we look at Microsoft Word documents; we have over 370 million that are listed online. Rich text format, we have 26.7 million listed online. Excel documents, over 128 million. Video content, we have over 65 million NPEG files listed in Google. Flash content, there are over 212 million flash videos that Google has listed online. So there is quite a bit of media, and when we create these documents, we''re not always sure whether or not it''s going to stay with the person that we are sending it to, or if one day that document is going to make its way onto the web and be available to the public. That''s why it''s always important to create accessible content at the start and not worry about it later on as it changes hands. So let’s take a look at our portable document format, the PDF. We want to make sure it has a tagged reading order. The content was created as PDF, often times it''s a scanned document so someone may have taken a scanned image of a form or what have you and e mail it to us. Somebody may have posted that on the web If it''s scanned, we need to learn the OCR so the text characters can be identified and we need to identify such things as the document language of the PDF. The reason we do that is so that the screen reader, no matter what language the person using the screen reader uses, the screen reader can identify the default language of the document that it''s reading. \ Sometimes it may be Spanish, sometimes it may be English, but it needs to be identified in the document properties. Real quick just as a side note, whenever you go into a PDF document and you''re creating it, W acrobat is usually a very useful tool for creating accessible PDF content. In order to tag your content, if you go to the top tabs there is an accessibility tab there that you scroll down to and will allow you to select a tagged reading order and to create a reading order that makes logical sense. If you want to identify the document language, go to the properties tab of your document, there is a space there for you to identify the language of that specific document. And this is usually the most problematic areas when we talk about PDF, the tagged reading order in case you have columns, so that the content is reading the complete column and going to the next adjacent column and reading that in order. So that''s just a quick heads up on PDF documents. There''s a quick check reference that''s available for PDFs by going to the file tab and then selecting properties or keyboard short cut control D to they can check the accessibility of your PDF once it is completed. As a quick reference, accessible PDFs under the description tab will determine if the document has been tagged, give the title of the document a meaningful name, which will be displayed on search results pages, add the author''s name, give the meaningful subject of the document, apply queue words to the document separated by comma with no spaces so it''s searchable on the web. Again, talking about PDFs, we want to apply the tags to the document if no tags are present from the document properties. So we do so by hitting the advanced tab selecting accessibility. And then select add tags to the document. From there you can either correct the tags or fix them from the tags panel. The most common tag issues with PDF, are P tags, paragraph tags used for paragraphical content, form tags to take into consideration if you''re creating a PDF document. We have LI tags for lists and heading orders as well. This one should be taken into account when creating PDF content so that the user using assistive technologies will know at any point when they jump into the content of a PDF document whether they''re reading the beginning of the paragraph header or if it''s a form they should interact with or the content is paragraphical. Make sure that figure tags are used so that images are also described to screen reader technology. The tags that are used for pages that contain tables use the table tags. We have table headers, so whenever you create a table within a PDF, make sure the table headers are identified, table ways are identified, all the table data should be identified so a screen reader can identify each table within the PDF document. We always need the following, tool tips to provide the descriptions to the viewer using an assistive technology tool to explain for what the form fields mean and what action to apply to it. For instance, I''m sending someone a survey and it has a radio button to check followed by content that describes what they''re checking, the radio button needs a tool kit to describe what action is needed by the user. For example, check here, but use a more descriptive tool kit that says check here for if it''s some meeting, payment to the IRS for example so they know when they check on that radio button they will know exactly what they''re selecting without having to go back and forth throughout the content where it doesn''t make sense. The main things we want to be concerned about with accessible PDF documents is that we create alternative text for images. Any image content within the page should have alternative text description for it. If we have images that that are background, that don''t contribute to the content or meaning of the document, then those images should be background images whenever we''re tagging the document so it doesn''t interfere with a screen reader and disappears as a background image and not mentioned to the screen reader technology. The reason I say that is if you have a bunch of images that appear on a PDF document and some images are graphical and they don''t have any style so they can be quite distracting to a screen reader user. That''s why we tag it as a background image as opposed to tagging it as an image and giving it an alternative description. Make sure to create the tags from the tag panel, create tag from the touch up reading order tool, apply the alternative text by right clicking on the figure, and clicking on properties. Under the tag tab enter a meaningful description in the alternative text box. This is the step by step procedure to make your image content accessible within Adobe PDF documents. Make sure to add book marks to your PDF files. For documents that contain over ten pages, tables must have the proper tag to identify within the table tags. We need to add table headers, table rows, et cetera. Now, once you''ve completed your PDF document, tagged the images and tagged the reading order, and you''ve identified the language of the document it should flow in a logical reading order. You should be able to read the content in a logical manner. If someone is using screen reader technology, the document should read from left to right and top to bottom unless you have tagged it in a way that will read one column first from top to bottom and move to the next column and read that content from top to bottom. So that covers portable document formats. We want to move now to Word files. Word files are can be very problematic as well to people with disabilities, and it''s really important this one is often overlooked but we want to make it accessible, and so often the Word document will be transferred on to the web for public viewing. People with disabilities that use screen reader technology or different types of assistive technology need to be able to understand the information, interact with it, and use it. So if it''s a Word file, in order for this to happen effectively, there are some things we need to do. First of all, we need to stop using bold and instant font and font sized settings. Instead, we need to create style sheets. Style sheets separate the content from the look and feel from the appearance of the document, and it interacts very well with screen reader technologies. It''s forward and backwards compatible for older technologies and newer technologies and It flows well for the web. We need to make sure we label image content. Now, a lot of people overlook labeling image content on a Word document. For example, if you send something with letterhead that has your company''s logo or your state seal or what have you, those images are going to appear to a screen reader and those images need to be identified so that folks will understand what the image is. It''s not just going to tell you automatically. In order to do that, in order to label the image, you right click on the image, select the option to format the picture, click on the alternative text tab and provide a brief description. You don''t know how many Word files I review daily and I check to see if before it was sent to me, the content creators have looked at and identified these things. Usually I''ll check the labels that exist and check to see if the documents have been tagged. I would say about 99% of the time they are not. So this is something that is really often overlooked. It''s an easy fix. And it''s something that should be incorporated into best practices so that everybody is creating accessible Word files. Now another type of media to take into consideration is PowerPoint documents, similar to what I have here presenting to you. Best way to create PowerPoint in an accessible fashion is to create a text or HTML equivalent. Again, we need to make sure any images contained within the PowerPoint document are also tagged. I''ll share with you a presentation that I created here. What I did was I had it saved originally as a PowerPoint document. Then I did a conversion to text only. The text only format, the way it''s formatted, so it''s accessible and usable to people not seeing the visuals that the PowerPoint presents is a very simple order. For example, slide one as a text equivalent shows slide one the heading, then shows the content. If it''s tabbed, if it''s bulleted, the content reads logical all the way down the page so the entire 80 some odd slides are presented as slide one, heading, content, slide two, heading, content and so forth. That''s a way to create an accessible PowerPoint equivalent so that people who are unable to use PowerPoint or unable to benefit from it have an accessible equivalent. I wonder if anybody ever thought about accessible e mail moving out of documents and moving into the accessibility of e mail. I don''t know how many e mails you create in one day. I know I go through quite a bit. E mail, if you''re not aware of who the recipient is going to be, can be sometimes be problematic. I just learned this at a project I did with the assistive technology not too long ago when I was writing about best practices for creating accessible e mail. Now, these best practices are really on a case by case basis, but I''m going to go through them with you so that you''re able to create e mails that are accessible to people with disabilities. So there are various e mail formats available, but for those that use screen readers, some may hinder access to screen content and prevent the user from making sense of the messages received. Now, the problem that I had with HTML formatted e mails was that sometimes people with low vision need to be able to magnify the content of their e mails simply by using the control plus key. And what that does is it magnifies the content to a much larger size. The problem that we encountered with HTML formatted e mail is that the content of that e mail in magnified vision control plus did not always magnify proportionately. Some of the content would overlap, some would be unreadable, and images may not increase in size while the text does increase in size. It was very unpredictable. When we''re talking about the problems with accessibility and HTML formatted e mail, an alternative we found much more usable to people with low vision and we talk about case by case. We want to take a look at creating the e mail by default as plain text instead. The plain text e mail will allow an individual to magnify the content of their e mail. It will be very interactive, it will be very usable by a person, however, it lacks a lot of style, the look and the feel that some of us may prefer. So whenever I send out e mails, I usually by default send them as plain text so that they are accessible to people with disabilities. One of the benefits, however, for HTML formatted e mail is it''s usually easier to navigate to links because they''re hyperlinked. And so if you are sending information with a lot of links in it, some people may prefer it is received as an HTML version as opposed to plain text which will make their reading experience a lot easier to jump from link to link if necessary. Again, this is something that I would just ask people to be aware of who they''re sending e mail content to. If you''re sending e mail on a listserv, you may want to check with the preferences of individuals on that listserv as to what format they want it in. It''s usually not very difficult to create it in either format; it''s just a matter of pausing and taking the time to create that. HTML e mail and accessible e mail format enable the recipient to use the full functionality of their assistive technology. This benefits people primarily that use screen reader technology, refreshable Braille and what have you. It does not necessarily always benefit somebody with low vision who may need to magnify the content of the e mail and not use assistive technology. If it includes non-text elements such as images or links, they must include alternative text descriptions, alt attributes that will make sense to somebody using screen reader technology. You''ll see that in all of the content that we create we talk about PowerPoint, PDF, e mail, whenever you mix image content with text, again, all of those images need to be identified with alternative descriptions. With alt attributes so people using screen reader technologies will be able to understand what those images are. Going back to plain text e mail, plain text e mails are accessible to recipients that require assistive technology to read the content. Most of the benefit is to people with low vision that may need to magnify the content. When several links are included within the e mails of a plain text e mail, screen reader technologies are apt to read the URL links without associating any textual description to those links so that if you include hyperlinks on a plain text e mail, the screen reader technology is going to read the entire hyperlink. For example, www.albritton.us/about-us.HTML that''s the about us page on one of my websites. Sometimes the links that are created do not make sense to a person, so you may have something that says Albritton.United States (US)/1234567.HTML. The number makes no sense to anybody, and so it''s often very important that as you''re saving your documents and naming them, that you give them names that make logical sense to a reader when taken out of context and may be read, for example, a plain text e mail so that they understand where that document is going to lead to. But these are simple best practices that, again, sometimes are overlooked. When using plain text e mail this tedious task requires a screen reader user to navigate through the entire message to determine which link is associated with which text. If the plain text e mail contains dialogue from forwarded messages, then those messages may include different symbols such as a greater than symbol to represent headings or the beginning of a paragraph. Screen reader technologies read each individual character out loud creating extraneous noise, so that would be the down side to using plain text e mail as opposed to HTML. These are things you''ll need to weigh depending on the audience that you intend to deliver your content to. Moving from e mails into listservs, we need to create an accessible listserv and make sure that, again we have text equivalent for every non text element. Non-text element meaning any images that may exist, any banners, and things of that nature. We do so by using the alt attribute. If it''s a long description, then we use a long description attribute for it. Usually the alt attribute character descriptions are about seven characters up to, say, 44 for an effective description of an image. Anything beyond that, then we usually use a long description. Listservs should contain the equivalent alternatives that they included any embedded multimedia presentations. If you''re sending a listserv out to somebody and it has a video content on flash content embedded within it, you need to make sure that content is accessible. If you''re sending content out that includes videos, then we need to also identify for the user where they can down load an applet that is free and accessible in order to view the content that you''re forwarding to them. Again, with listservs we need to make sure any HTML formatted listservs are designed so that all the information that is conveyed with color is also available to the user without color. And then HTML formatted listservs should be organized so they''re readable without using any style sheet. What that means for non-techy folks, is if I''m sending you a listserv e mail and the e mail is set with a gray background and uses characters in 14 point font, the look and feel is something I set but, an individual that has a disability and wants to change the preferences should be able to modify without difficulty. Those preferences are referred to as style sheets, and so creating content on listservs so that individuals can use their own style sheets to adjust the look and feel of the content is very important as well. Rows and columns and headers should also be identified for listservs. Any kind of data table that you have should be readable and understandable to screen reader technology. Make sure that you use markup language to associate the data cells and header cells for the data table within the listservs and make sure the reading order, if it is complex, is again in a logical reading order that''s been tagged. When we''re talking about the HTML formatted listserv, again the content should not cause the screen to flicker with a frequency of 2 Hertz or as low as 55 Hertz, so that people that may have seizure disorders are not be prone to seizure activity while viewing this flashy content, which has been known to happen in the past. You want to make sure the flickering tendency within any content is in that range. Be sure to attach a content only e mail within the information so that people that may not be able to use the listserv in the format you sent it are able to get the information nonetheless. Now, make sure when you''re designing a list serve, the content uses scripting hanging to explain content or create interface elements so that the content is identified with functional text that can be read by assistive technologies. So this goes back to usability and interaction with individuals that require screen reader technology or any kind of technology to engage with the content you''re creating. When a listserv or any other kind of content you create requires an applet or plug in to be used, you need to make sure, again, that the applet is available in an accessible, free, down loadable link that''s always provided somewhere within the context of the information that you''re sending so that if somebody doesn''t have that applet, they know exactly where to go to receive it. Now we will talk about accessibility of the web. We talked earlier about content being forward and backward accessible compatible for older technologies as well as future technologies. And so when we''re designing content for the web, we want to make sure we validate the information and create the code for the web as accessible XHTML 1.0 strict code. Make sure you use cascading style sheets to separate the styles from the content and validate the code for that content. Be careful using JAVA script. Make sure your content works with or without JAVA script turned on. This is typical with JAVA script navigation that people like to create. I''m just going to jump through this here a little bit more quickly so we can open up for questions here soon. Make sure you check for broken hyperlink nervous system to make sure hyperlinks in your website are not outdated. External links are most prone to this, so it''s good to do a thorough scan of your website to make sure the links are current. Make sure the color contrast is accessible to people with color blindness or low vision. That means being careful with your use of red or green, definitely avoid when possible using red or green, but when avoiding is not an option, then you want to create red tones or green tones that provide the highest level of contrast either against the foreground with the background so that individuals with color blindness can make sense of the content being created in that color. Luminosity, sometimes color combinations do not provide sufficient contrast so we have to make sure the contrast that we provide is crisp, that there''s a lot of contrast. So for individuals with low vision or color blindness, the contrast will be enhanced in the content they receive so it''s more readable. For individuals with photo sensitive epilepsy, we want to make sure to limit the amount of animations that are presented on the web. That the frequencies of those animations are within the frequency we spoke about. Web pages that follow these guidelines that we''re talking about make sure, that these web pages are also optimal so they can be downloaded for fast or slow modems old or new technologies, so we don''t want to put a burden on the bandwidth so that the image can be downloaded or uploaded without any difficulty and not utilize too much bandwidth. So we want to make sure images are optimized, the HTML code is optimized and that our content requires the least amount of bandwidth as possible. Again, we want to talk about image optimization that goes back to making sure the website is on boarded, so websites aren''t bloated. We optimize and remove unused pixels and change the overall size of the image so it down loads faster and remains viewable without distortion. I want to jump towards the end now and open up to question. I''ve identified the accessibility issues that we need to address regarding PDF documents, Word documents, image content and the website. When you receive this slide show from the archives, there''s more detail that I go into, much more detail as far as making it multiple format accessible, but I would like to open up to questions right now because I''m kind of going over. So at this time, I''m going to open it up to questions.

NEAL ALBRITTON

Where can we get access to the slides? The Disability and Business Technical Assistance Center (DBTAC) has access to the slides, and you will be able to get that information after this presentation. But I also want to point out something as well, that there''s a document that I did create just recently that has this in much more technical detail similar to the question that John asked about making 2003 Word accessible and Word 2007 and those differences that exist. On slide 82 what we have here is the contact to the document you can access the document that I created through the alliance for assistive technology. The e mail is ATAInfo@ATAaccess.org. Or you can call them at 800 914 3107 to request a copy of the accessibility checklist. Are there specific tricks to making spreadsheets accessible? Donna, I think I would use the tricks that I use, they''re not really shortcuts. Sometimes, especially making spreadsheets, you''ve got to go in there and identify the headers and columns. If I could if I could offer any good advice when it comes to creating accessible spreadsheets, it''s to make sure they''re not complex in such a fashion that you have columns that are interrupted by other sub columns that don''t follow a linear path so that if you''re creating a spreadsheet, you know, you may have a very complex spreadsheet with cells that are not linearized. I''m not sure if folks know what that means, but basically I would avoid any kind of complex spreadsheet, make it as linear as possible, make it as readable as possible, and test it on people with disabilities to see if they understand the draft format before you circulate it in public. I think that would be the best advice I have for creating accessible spreadsheets. You''re always welcome to contact me when you do create that if you want some advice on it if you''re having a tough time figuring out how to make it accessible. Next question from Tracy, do you know how often state agencies are using accessible fillable forms or state forms, for example, the IRS? Stacy, that''s a good question. Are state agencies using accessible forms are these fillable forms. A lot of the forms that exist and that are in circulation right now, many of them are not accessible and so agencies need to prioritize how to convert those documents which are being most circulated which are being used most frequently by the public and start collecting those documents. If I were going to give you a word of advice as far as state agencies and the accessible forms that they circulate, I would start out by telling you or telling people to make sure that all content from this point forward is accessible. And then go back and identify the priorities of older archived documents that individuals either access frequently or going to interact with Multilanguage documents and things of that nature, go back and prioritize those and then address them promptly. For those documents, I would also make sure that people can contact a live person so that if it hasn''t been made accessible yet, they can request it promptly and it can be addressed right away. Donna asked is there a way to identify reading orders when using text boxes in MS Word? Donna, the best way I would recommend is to down load and this goes for anybody, not just with MS Word, but anybody creating an Excel document or what have you. Down load the free version of jaws screen reader. It allows a 40 minute trial to be used and pull up your document and run it through. Close your eyes and listen to the content that is read and see if it makes sense to you. You can also contact or create a group of users that use accessible technologies if you have some available to create test users before any documents are finalized and circulated. You can also write me if you want to know more about that. Sherry writes, is there a way online to test style size optimization for low bandwidth users? Sherry, there is. Usually what I do is I go through I use FireFox quite a bit and some of the accessibility down load tools that they have available. What I do is go through and one of them includes optimization of the content of the size of the document. But in addition to that, in the manual, the accessibility checklist, this goes for everybody, all of the resources and all of the tools are listed in that accessibility checklist for each area including optimization, HTML optimization, cache giving, style sheets optimization so the tools are there for you as well. The shortcuts are available there as well the information is explained very easy to understand for folks that may not be technical. Okay. Any last questions okay hearing none, I know this was a lot of information to go through especially in a short period of time. This is typically a two-day presentation, but I did want to give you some insight into the information standards and best practices that I utilize and try to share with others in order to create content accessible to people with disabilities. You may have questions. If you do have questions after this presentation, feel free to write me. You can e mail me at Neal@section508guru.com. Feel free to contact me with whatever questions you may have and I''ll try to respond to those promptly. Okay. If we have any additional questions, again, feel free to contact me. If not, you can go back and you can access this slide show from the DBTAC once it''s available online, it will be available and made as an archive for you. Okay. I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to join me on this presentation. I really appreciate your time and I hope that each of you take this information back and make a good effort to create accessible content for everyone to enjoy. Thank you.

JANET PETERS

Thank you, Neal. That was an excellent presentation, and a lot of information for folks to Peruse. As Neal mentioned you can e mail him directly as well as us at the Great Lakes ADA Center for technical support. There is a survey in the chat area you can fill out for an evaluation of today''s session. This will also be e mailed to you. The handouts, the slides that Neal is showing, will be forwarded to you as well. And the archive will be available in 10 business days. Thank you all for your attention, and hopefully we''ll see you at another Accessible Technology Webinar session. Thanks.