Professional Development Day 2024: Accessibility Basics You Should Know

My presentation for this year’s Professional Development Day on accessibility basics, including an overview of recent Title II changes, an NVDA screen reader demo, and how and why to properly set up alt text, headings, descriptive links, and other accessibility basics.

A link to allow Highline employees to download the presentation, a chapter listing linking to those points in the video, and the transcript are listed below the video.

Presentation Slides

Highline employees may download the slide deck from this Google Drive folder.

Chapters

Transcript

Intro

[Audio starts momentarily…]

Okay, so before I start the main part of this, many of you know me. I’ve either talked with you or worked with you in person or over email, but there’s a good chance that many of you don’t. We haven’t crossed paths yet.

My name’s Michael Hanscom. I’m our Program Manager for Accessible Technology. So my role here is basically twofold. About half of it is working with students to make sure that they know about the accessible technology we have on campus and how to use it so they’re successful in their classes. The other part is working with faculty and staff to make sure that you know about the accessible technology we have and to make sure that when you’re creating your classes or if you’re staff, when you’re creating documents or anything that gets, or web pages or anything that gets sent out, that we’re creating things in a manner that is going to be accessible for those people who are using assistive technology.

So that’s the high level overview of my role. Basically, what a lot of times what it boils down to is I’m a bit of a pest. I’ll pop up in your email every so often saying, hey, you know, accessibility could be a little bit better here or a little bit better here if you do these couple things. And so forgive me if I’m a little bit of a pest, but that’s my job. It’s what they pay me for. All in the service of this.

So as I’m going through feel free to ask questions. For those of you online, you could pop in with audio or you can put them in chat. I will do my best to keep an eye on the chat window as I’m going.

And… Yeah, we’ll just get started. So thank you for being here. This is great. I love seeing this many people here. So yeah, so just going over some accessibility basics here. And… There we go. Now, I put more transitions in here than I remembered. Okay.

Why do this?

There we are. So why do we do this? A lot of why we do this is that not everybody discloses. We teach and we work with disabled students and employees that we don’t know about. It’s up to the individual whether they let people know whether they have a disability. (Letting people in and switching back and forth.) People don’t need to be disabled to benefit. A lot of the accessibility tweaks that we make in things carry over and have benefits for all users. And we’ll see a little bit of that later on.

Creating with accessibility saves time later. At any point, especially if you’re an instructor or if you’re staff, someone could come up to you and say, hey, I use assistive technology, but you’re sending me stuff that I can’t read. It’s going to be a lot easier if we are creating stuff with accessibility in mind to start with than if we have to go back afterward and rework, recreate everything that we’ve already created.

And then very importantly, these are legal requirements. We’re covered under Section 504, the ADA Title I and II, and Section 508 on the federal level. Here at the state level, we’re covered under what is now called USER-01, but is also known as Policy 188. And then SBCTC has an accessibility policy. So we have a lot of things telling us that this is something we really need to be paying attention to. In addition to the fact that it’s just good to do.

Title II

So Title II is the primary thing that applies. This applies to all public entities, including community colleges. Just making sure that anyone with disabilities has equal access to all of our materials.

This covers web content, electronic documents, and that includes instructional content within Canvas. It includes textbooks. So if you’re an instructor who is looking at a new textbook or maybe revising an existing textbook, as you’re working with your publisher representatives, we want to make sure that you’re asking them about the accessibility of their online offerings to make sure that we’re not either purchasing something or asking students to purchase something that they wouldn’t be able to use.

And Title II has just recently, back in April, been updated to establish stricter standards. In the past, Title II existed, it covered us, but it basically said, things should be accessible. And it was kind of vague on that front. It was vague on what exactly that meant. So it was a little vague on what exactly accessibility meant. It has just recently been updated to give us actual standards saying these are the particular standards you need to meet. I’m not going to go into the details of that here. We’re just going over some of the basics today. But it is nice to know that we now have we now know what we are aiming for when we talk about accessibility.

And then the compliance date for this, the new Title II rule was published on April 24th, 2024, with our size of institution and the population in the community that we serve, we have two years to implement this. So our compliance date is April 24th, 2026. This is when we should know that to the best of our ability, all of our classroom materials are accessible, our website is accessible, any documents we have on the website, basically anything publicly accessible or accessible to students within Canvas, meets the basic accessibility guidelines. And then there’s more information on — my captions here are blocking this (laughs) — but there’s more information about this on the linked ADA fact sheet, and you all, I’ll have a link available and a QR code at the end of this where you can download this presentation and, so you can actually click through the links that just show up as pretty underlined text right now.

Everyone’s responsibility

So one of the things we want to stress is this is a college-wide responsibility. Everybody’s responsible for paying attention to this.

I’m the Program Manager for Accessible Technology, which sounds very impressive. I have a department of one. That’s me. And as much as I would try, it’s just not realistic for me to make sure the entire college is accessible. So this is something that we all need to be paying attention to as we work. I’m happy to help. I’m happy to train. I’m happy to answer questions. But again, I can’t do it all myself.

And this is one of the things, one of the reasons, big reasons we’re talking about this. Now, in my role—as instructors, many of you are probably, hopefully, familiar with Ally, which is the accessibility checker that’s built into Canvas that you can use to check the accessibility of your Canvas courses. As part of my role, I’m able to take a look at the back end of Ally and get a campus-wide score.

Now, of course, this is just a snapshot and it only covers Canvas classes, so this doesn’t cover the overall website, it doesn’t cover everything that we create as staff, everything along those lines. So it’s a snapshot of one section of Highline.

But what it does, it looks at the web pages in Canvas. It looks like, at the documents that are attached to Canvas courses, and it assigns scores to each of those, the more accessible they are, the higher the score. And here at Highline, one of the good things is we’ve had a really strong accessibility awareness for a number of years. I specifically like to thank Marc Lentini and Jenni Sandler. They’ve been doing a really good job of making sure accessibility is part of the conversation from long before I started, I came on about two and a half years, almost three years ago now.

So we have this in mind already. And you can see as we’ve been working on it, this is quarter by quarter starting in 2013, our scores were slowly but gradually increasing for a long time, just as more people learned about this, they knew the techniques, they were getting better about this.

Lasted all the way through the pandemic where everything moved online. And you can see as we’re in the pandemic, everybody’s online. We’re used to working with electronic documents more. We know we have to pay attention to stuff. We know we have to have captions. Scores went up and then the pandemic ended…and scores went down. And now we’ve kind of hit a plateau and that plateau is actually a little bit lower than we’ve been since we started tracking scores.

Now, there are a few possible reasons for this. Some of it could just be the collective sigh of relief. We’re not teaching entirely online anymore. We’re back in person. I’m back to making paper handouts and handing those out. I’m just, you know, maybe not thinking about these things as much. Could also be that there’s a lot of turnover. There’s a lot of new people coming in. They weren’t involved in the pushes and the training that were a large part of these years rolling up to that. So there are a few different reasons and I’m certainly not calling anybody out in particular. It’s just it’s a very real effect that we’re seeing. And we want to be aware of that and see if we can’t start pushing those lines back up again as we move forward into the future.

Okay, so one of the things I wanted to do here is start with a demonstration of the NVDA screen reader. And I actually forgot to…see, I need to jump into Drive for just a moment, which I apparently closed. So my apologies for this. I forgot to open up this link ahead of time.

(And what is this?) (Stop.) (I’m not running Adobe Acrobat.) ((Laughs) I don’t know why it did that. Okay.) (Let me try this again.) [click] (Oh, and now I need to do the sign-in dance. So this is [beep] going to get really exciting for a couple moments.) [beep] [click] [beep] (Because we have very strong security on everything we do here, which is very good and a royal pain in the butt.) (So that’s just [click] the reality.) (Okay, wrong.) [beep] (Folder…) [click] (Presentation…) [beep] [click] [beep] [click] [beep] [click] (Okay.) [beep] Well, I’m going to start… [grumble] I’m going to start by grumbling at the computer. [click] [click] [beep]

And my apologies for the beeps. This is because [click] I have NVDA running already. I have it in what’s called “speech off” mode, so it’s not talking at us right now. But it’s still doing these beeps to let us know that I’m [beep] clicking on things, I’m doing things. (I don’t need a theme. Thank you very much, Word.)

Okay, so here we have, this is a copy of the accessible, um… (I can’t speak. Give me just a drink.) This is a copy of the accessible syllabus template. Faculty, you may have seen this, you may be basing your syllabi on it, or you may be building your own syllabi. Either way, it’s fine. But we provide this so that if you are creating a new syllabus, you have this as a starting point. You can just copy and paste information onto it. And you know everything will be, you will have an accessible starting point.

Except for this version, which I’ve tweaked. Because one of the things I want to start with is let you see what it’s like when someone using assistive technology is reading something. So I’m going to turn speech on.

Speech mode beeps. Speech mode talk.

Michael: Okay, so NVDA is the screen reader. It’s now running. It’s going to start talking as I do things.

Digital Accessibility, document graphic image 1.jpg [beep] Image1.jpg graphic selected. Layout option. [beep]

Come on. [click]

Carriage return selected. Doc— [beep]

I’m going to try to—

Rachel Stewart, she slash her, spring 2024. Digital.

So just one thing you may be picking up on already, if you’re new to using a screen reader, it can get really overwhelming really quickly because it reads everything that you’re doing. With practice, you get more used to it. I don’t practice as much as someone who’s using it full time, but.

So what I’m going to do is just going to start this reading and let it read through and we’ll listen for a moment to give an idea of how this document sounds, because as visual learners we see we’ve got the logo, we’ve got a nice big header at the top, we have bold headers here and here to let us know that we’re in different sections. Got a lot of stuff there that lets us know how the document is structured. When I start this running…

Graphic selected image 1.jpg bookmark digital accessibility 101 spring 2024 graphic image 2.jpg bookmark instructor information instructor's name Michael Hanscom instructor's office spelling error building, room 25 to

I’ll pause it there for just a moment. But you might have noticed a couple things; you may not have, because, if this is your first time listening to a screen reader.

But when it said it started with just Highline, it just said “graphic”, and then it gave a file name, but it didn’t say anything other than that. When it came here, it did the same thing, just “graphic”. It just read things down… and there was nothing there to indicate, okay, this is a heading, this is a different section of the document. It was just a string of text and no information beyond that.

Okay, so a reader might, an assistive technology user might be, “hey, okay, that’s a little confusing. Let me see if I can figure something out.”

No next heading.

If I press the letter H, I can jump from heading to heading to heading within a document, and you can see we have headings.

No next heading, no next heading.

There are no actual headings there. Everything here is just text that we’ve formatted but it’s not actually defined as a heading. So I can’t jump from heading to heading. Well, let’s just make one last check.
One of the things I can do….

Elements List dialogue. Tree view, heading, type. Gr–, type, links.

Okay, one of the things the screen reader user can do is pull up a list of every heading in a document. And of course, that list is empty. So they have no way to navigate the document beyond just starting to listen to it and reading all the, and listening to the whole thing all the way through.

Another thing they can do, maybe they’re looking, okay, okay, so there’s no headings. That’s not great. I can find my way around if I try hard enough. I’ll bet the instructor has linked to some important information. So I’m going to take a look at what links are in the document to see what I can find there.

Links radio button pressed not checked alt plus K. Checked.

So here’s a list of every link in the document. But what you see is…I have a bunch of links that say “click here”. Now, this is something that is very, very common when people are creating documents. They’ll say, you need to go to this thing or the other thing, and then maybe in parentheses afterwards, they’ll say, click here, or they’ll say something, click for more information.

But when an assistive tech user is going through the document, that doesn’t give them any context. They have no idea where any of these links are heading.

In addition, you might have a link where rather than embedding it in any text, even text that says “click here”, you might have a link that is just the full URL, starting with HTTPS. Okay, we know where it’s taking us, but for someone who’s listening to the doc:

Headings, errors radio button links radio button tree view. Click here one of eight level 0. Rachel Stewart, she slash her, has left the meeting alert. HTTPS slash slash apps.leg.wa.gov slash whack slash default dot aspx site equals 132 i126 2 of 8 level 0.

So that’s what an assistive tech user hears if they encounter a URL that is not embedded within text. They hear the whole URL being read out loud like that. And you can, I mean, that was hard enough to understand. You might have caught that although there’s a question mark in between ASPX and cite, that was not pronounced. It does its best to read the strings as words, which means sometimes the information gets garbled. And you can imagine, I’m sure you’ve all by now seen links to Google Docs, which is something like docs.google.com and then like a 37 character string of random letters. You know, if you’re trying to figure out where that’s going to take you or what it means, or if you’re just even, okay, maybe I can listen to it and try and type it in on my own, yeah, it doesn’t work terribly well.

Email addresses are generally okay.

Access at highline.edu three of eight level 0. Access.highline.edu 4 of 8 level 0

Those are fairly nice because it’s a short, easily understandable address. So that kind of link is usually fine. But then as they go through, there’s more links.

Click here, click here, click here, click here eight of eight level zero.

And they have no idea where any of those are going. So this is the kind of thing that a lot of…

Speech mode on demand, speech mode off.

There we go. So this is the kind of thing that a lot of assistive technology users will encounter when they’re working with documents that have not been set up with accessibility in mind to start with.

Now I’ll download one more document. There we are. [click] [beep] [click] There we are.

Okay. So once again, we have our accessible, we have our syllabus. The document visually looks nearly identical. In fact, I think it does look identical at this stage. Anything else, any of the changes are further down. But here, when I start it reading….

Speech mode beeps, speech mode talk. Graphic Highline, N Bilal put in waiting room. N Bilal put, desk, desk, two people entered, participants. 21. Window. N Bilal has left the waiting, desk. This digital, Ying Tran has left the waiting room for this meeting alert. Sample syllabus, two people have joined the meeting alert. Sample syllabus, accessible. Word. Docu— Document Graphic Highline College Logo Page.

Okay, that’s enough of that. Okay. So let’s try listening to that document again.

Graphic Highline College logo heading level 1 bookmark digital accessibility 101 spring 2024 Graphic two female presenting BIPOC students working together in our chemistry lab on an experiment. Bookmark heading level 2 instructor information instructor's name. Michael Hanscom instructor's office

Okay, so I’ll just pause it there. Some pretty obvious differences as you’re reading through. We now have alt text on those images. So now it says Highline College logo. It gives a description of the image. We have a heading level one. We have a heading level two. So now we actually know where we are in the document, what we’re seeing with our images.

Kara Stewart, she slash they. has joined the meeting alert.

Okay. Now, if I were to bring up that list dialog box again.

Editor window. Pane. Desktop. Sam, building unselected. Grammar.

You know, Word, you’re not helping.

Ribbon tabs. Elements List Dialog. Tree view. Student, three, two, elements list.

I’m going to start with headings. So now we have a syllabus that has headings, and you can see where in the last version, it was completely blank. There was no way for the user to navigate. Now they can go through and they know exactly…

Headings, radio, tree view. How to succeed in this course, course text. Course prerequisites 4 of 7 Level 2.

So they can use this document. I mean, they can use this dialogue…

Ying Tran has left the meeting alert.

They can use this dialog to go through the entire document, see all the different headings, just the same way as sighted users, we can skim through a document, look for the bolded lines. We see the headings. They can use this to go through a document and see every heading there.

Within the document itself — I’m going to jump out of this.

How to succeed.

Where here, they can use that H key…

Page 3 Section 1 Heading Level 3 Bookmark information about our course assignments Heading level 2 grading and relay, heading level 3 general college.

So they can use the H key again without calling up that list, but they can just jump heading to heading to heading, move very quickly throughout a document.

Elements List Dialog. Tree view. Level zero student.

Now we have that link list that I was showing earlier. It’s the same links we had in the last document. Only now they tell us where they’re going — well, I missed one somewhere, that third one looks a little odd. But now, as we’re going through, when we look at those links, now we know the first link is to the student conduct process. Second link…

Student conduct code WAC 1321 to 12; 6, 3 of 9; access; instructional grievance process; RCW 49.60.030; the title nine page; advisor request form.

So again, now they know there are links, but they also know where those links are going. And if they click on them, where it’s going to take them.

Sample syllabus.

So…where’s my…

Speech mode on demand, speech mode off.

Okay, so that’s just a really a quick demo. There’s a lot more that screen readers can do. If you ever get a chance to see someone who uses a screen reader regularly, and you get a chance to watch them, it is fascinating. This is the default speed for a screen reader to go. Someone who’s been using it for a long time will have that cranked so fast that to my ears, it is completely unintelligible. However, they’re used to it. They can process it. They can do everything.

Screen readers are built into either built into operating systems or available as, are available on their own. Let’s see. Here we go. The one I was using is NVDA, which is freely downloadable, and we actually have it installed on Highline computers. It’s the one I’m most likely to recommend to students or anyone who’d like to experiment with a screen reader because it is free.

JAWS is very well known, but it’s paid software. Windows has Narrator built into the operating system for free.
The Mac OS has voiceover, and then Android and Chrome have TalkBack. So screen readers are already built into every operating system, and you can get different ones if you like.

And then I already talked about, and then I kind of skipped that. So that’s a basic overview of screen readers, how they work, what they do, and what it means when I say someone hears a document that’s inaccessible, someone can’t read it, even if they might be able to read it in the sense that a program will be able to give them the text, formatting a document correctly so that they have this extra information goes a long way to making sure that they can interact with the document the same way that a sighted user does.

So now I’m going to copy this and put it in the chat. And the chat’s been very quiet, which is great. Hopefully that means that [click] things are going well. I’m actually going to stop NVDA for this point. So yes, I want to exit. [chime] So that should quiet things down a little bit.

So I’ve got a link in the chat and I can’t see this because of the Zoom toolbar, hold on just a second, there we go. Those of you who are here, you’re welcome to go to this bit.ly link. It’s hcpdd24acc: Highline College
Professional Development Day 2024 accessibility. So feel free to take a moment if you like. If you don’t want it, you can just follow along on your own and watch everything. That’s fine.

But this is going to download that inaccessible sample syllabus that I started with, where the screen reader was just reading the text and nothing else. So we’ll download that and then open it. You can open it in Word or Google Docs, whatever you prefer.

Personally, I greatly prefer Word over Google Docs. Word has much better support for accessibility. Google Docs does handle the basics that we’re covering today, though. But I’ll be using Word as I do things.

So I’ll just take a couple of moments to pause so everybody has time to get that downloaded and open. If you’re going to do that. Are there any immediate questions from what I’ve gone over so far?

Yeah. [Inaudible] Mm-hmm. [Inaudible] Yes. [Inaudible]

Okay, the question for those of you online, the question was about when I was looking at the two documents, in the first one, “building” was either misspelled or abbreviated and Word flagged that as a misspelling and the second one it didn’t.

The best answer I can give for that is Word is weird sometimes. I may have saved the document differently. I may have, when you get misspellings, you can right click and say ignore. So I may have done that at some point. But that was a, that was there was a change in how Word was interacting with the screen reader, but not anything about the screen reader itself. Absolutely.

Okay. So I’m going to assume by this point that everybody is tech savvy enough that you either have the document open or you’re just going to watch. So we’re going to go ahead.

Alt text

So the first thing I want to talk about is alt text. You may have heard about this already, but just to make sure. Alt text is what made sure that when those images came up in the accessible version of the document, they actually said something.

So alt text is just a description of what’s in the image. It’s a text alternative. And then screen readers read that alt text, so visual disabled users know what the image is.

So when you’re writing alt text, you want to consider what’s important about the image and why it’s being included. Now, one of the examples I use, actually, the picture from the syllabus will work great for this.

Here we are. And it may depend, because, what alt text you use may depend on where you’re using the image. For instance, this image. If it was just used on a general page, maybe for the sciences section or just on the Highline website, it could very easily have alt text as simple as, two students performing an experiment. And that would give the, and in that context, it might give the user all the information they really need because that’s what it is.

But if, say, it’s used on another page, like maybe the sciences division has a page talking about the inclusivity of their program, or it’s on the DEI pages within Highline, that’s where it might use alt text like I had on here of saying, you know, two female presenting BIPOC students working together on a science experiment. Because within that context, part of the reason you’re using the image is showing that we are not just a purely cisgender male white campus. You’re saying that we have a much broader population than that.

So the same image used in different areas may have different alt text depending on the context and how it’s being used.

Swapping back to the slideshow. You can have decorative images. For instance, like say you’re putting a syllabus together for the fall quarter and you have like fall leaves blowing somewhere. They don’t actually add any content. It’s purely decorative.

And so when you’re in Microsoft Office’s products, they actually have a button that you can see here on the screenshot that says mark as decorative, and that tells screen readers to ignore it. Other times that might be a case where it’s okay to leave the alt text field blank and let the screen reader skip over it. Just because if they don’t know that that image is there, that’s okay.

But you do also want to think about, again, the context. Are you giving people the same basic experience? For instance, a syllabus might have like a Far Side comic that is subject related but doesn’t really contribute any information directly to the class. Is that decorative? You know, it’s not there with content, but if you don’t include alt text, then the visually disabled users don’t get that little bit of silliness and enjoyment that your sighted users do.

So there are no hard and fast rules other than in general, it’s best to have alt text there.

So to add alt text, and a quick tip, this also works in Outlook, so when you’re sending email, if you’re including alt text in, if you’re including images in email, you want to do this here also because all of this applies to email as well.

All you have to do is right click on the image and then down at the bottom of the context menu, you’ll see view alt text. Once you click that, it’ll bring up a window that lets you edit the alt text and put in whatever you want to say.

Google Docs works very much the same way. The wording is a little bit different, but you right click and you choose alt text. And then a box pops up where you have the field where you can enter the alt text for the image.

And again, alt text, it’s as much art as science. Sometimes just a few words is enough.

If you’re in a STEM field or mathematics and you’re dealing with tables or charts or things like that. Like for instance, the chart I showed of our ally scores. Now, for something like that, you don’t really need to say, you know, 2013, the score was this. 2014, the score was this. You don’t necessarily need to do that. The point of the chart was to say we had Ally scores that were improving for a long time through the pandemic. When the pandemic stopped, the scores have dropped. Using that for alt text gives the same information, even if it may not have the same detail. But you’re conveying the same information both to sighted users and visually disabled users.

So it’s one of those things that just takes practice. You kind of figure it out over time.

And then describe the image in the box that appears. Yes, here in the classroom, my captions are covering some of the text there. But yes, describe the image in the box that appears. Okay, I’m still…that’s good, no questions in the chat. Anything with alt text so far?

Yes. Hmm. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Just to recap really briefly for the people online, I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.

Trenton. Trenton from Public Safety was asking about the Cleary data reporting tables they have on the public safety website and in their annual report, you know, where it’s just recounting the number of particular types of incidents over the course of the year or a few years, how would that work?

And actually, as far as the website where you have the embedded Google Docs. That should work fine as, again, you want to make sure that the Google Sheets are set up for accessibility. So as long as there are headers in the table rows. So that should be fine.

For the charts, the tables that are in the annual report. Actually, I checked the annual report when it was sent out recently, and it actually had very good alt text. It was basically just a summary saying, you know, for this year, it didn’t go through cell by cell in the table. It just said for this period of time, we had no incidents or we had three incidents during this quarter. And it did a very good job of just summarizing what was important without having to without trying to list out every character in the table. So whoever did that did a great job.

Yeah. Yes.

Okay, yeah, the question here was about tables in WordPress for those of us who are still on WordPress websites. Using the Table Press plugin to create tables, is there alt text for that?

There are techniques to add alt text or with a table, it would actually be a table caption. Honestly, I don’t know how well Table Press supports those. I haven’t played with that very much. But you don’t really need alt text so much with a table because assistive technology users are able to navigate within the table. And then as long as a header row or a header column is defined, then as they’re navigating throughout the table, the screen reader will be able to tell them, say like, I’m just making something up here, column four, 2015, row three, arson, data, three incidents, which I hope is not the case. But it’s able to use the information in the header row and column to say, this is the header row and column information,this is the data, to give people that. So as they navigate through the table, they’re able to do that. You can also add a caption to the table to summarize the data, much like we would in alt text. So there are different methods depending on how complex the table is and what information needs to be there.

Yep. Awesome. Yeah. Okay.

Headings

Headings. So again, formatting, bold, italic, size, color can identify section headers and allows us as visual readers to just skim through a document and see where the different sections are. But if they’re not actually marked as headings, they’re not going to show up that way to screen readers. So we want to make sure to use section headers, to mark those section headers so assistive technology can pick up on them.

And the way we do that is by using styles. So using heading styles puts that structure into the document.

And this is one of those areas where not only does it make navigating a document easier for people using assistive technology, it also does so for everybody.

And I’m going to show you one trick here. In either Word or Google Docs, you can call up a visualization of the document outline to see what structure is there. So in this case, in Word, if you go to the View ribbon, and then click on the Navigation Pane option, you’ll see this pane open on the left-hand side of your document.

And here, we’re taking a look at a screenshot of the navigation pane as it shows up for the inaccessible version of the syllabus, where it just says, hey, create an outline. It’s a great way to know where you are. And yes, it is. Because that version of the document didn’t use styles for its headers, they were just formatted text, there’s no known structure for the document. Where on the accessible version of the document that I showed, just the same way as a screen reader user could pull up that dialog box that had all the headings listed out to allow them to navigate, that’s also available here in the navigation pane of the document. So you can see every header, you can see how they’re nested. You can see the full outline of the document there.

And so as a sighted user, if you’ve got a really, really long document, something maybe like that public safety report, you can pull that open and you can just scroll through here to jump to a specific section of the document instead of having to scroll, scroll, scroll, and hope you see the right heading scroll by as you’re going up and down the document.

You do the same thing within Google Docs. Here it’s the view menu show outline, and it’ll show up on the left hand side much the same way. Google Docs also has a shortcut, which I don’t have a screenshot of, but it’s one of those little three line hamburger menus, sits on the left side of the document; you can use that to quickly toggle the document outline on and off.

So if you have a document that needs headings, that, you may have seen the—I’m going to switch over to Word for just a moment to show this a little bit more clearly. You may have seen this Styles bar at the top. And a lot of people see that. They may play with it a little bit, but they may or may not be actively using it. Because they don’t really know exactly what it does. But this is exactly what it’s for. It allows you to define different styles of text that you can use throughout the document.

And so all it takes to set a heading for a particular line is just put your cursor somewhere in the text, and then choose the heading style you want. In this version, there’s a bunch of different heading styles listed because I’m using the dropdown instead of the fully spread across version. Then you can just choose the right heading level for whatever line you’re on.

In Google Docs, there’s a style menu. You just click that and then scroll, again, scroll down to the heading style you want and apply that to the line that you’re on.

Now, a few tips while you’re working with these.

You may have seen that there’s a Title style, which seems like a great idea. It seems very helpful. Don’t use it. There are kind of long, complicated reasons for this based on the way that screen readers work with documents and with websites. But what it boils down to is don’t worry, don’t use the title style. Just pretend it doesn’t exist. Just use the headings one through six.

I recommend, and this is a little fuzzy, but for best practices, I recommend that there should be one heading, a single Heading 1 as the title of the document. And then from then on, you can use as many Heading 2, 3, 4, whatever, just like a standard outline, however many of those that you like as you’re creating the rest of the document.

You just want to make sure you’re not skipping levels. And we see this a lot because Word and Google Docs have those built-in styles for the headings. People might say, well, I like the way this one looks. But for my next heading, I actually kind of like the way this one looks. And so I’ll choose that based on how it looks. But then you end up doing things like you’ve got a Heading 2, and the next thing you have in your document is a Heading 4.

Now, for a visual user, we may not ever pick up on that because we’re just looking at how it looks. But for someone using assistive technology as they’re going through, if they hear a document skip directly from Heading 2 to Heading 4, they don’t know. Is that intentional? Is there a Heading 3 in there that didn’t get marked and they need to go digging through to try and find it? Is the document outline broken? And they have to do a little searching or guessing or just shrug their shoulders and move on to figure out what’s going on. So you want to make sure that as you’re going down, you’re going Heading 2, Heading 3, Heading 4, and not skipping levels.

Of course, as with any outline, when you’re going back up the tree, you can skip from Heading 4 to Heading 2, and at that point, they know that they’re just moving higher in the outline level.

And as I was talking about, like I said, Word and Google Docs both come with their default heading styles, but you don’t have to use those. So if you don’t like the way they look, that’s fine. You can make them look any way you like.

So in that case, you just go to the heading style you like, set it to the correct heading level, then go ahead and reformat it. And then in Word, if you right click, if you right click on the heading, you’ll get this option to Update Heading 3 to Match Selection, or whatever heading level you’re on. And that way, that allows you to change the formatting to whatever you like.

This actually comes in really, really handy. Because I’m going to swap over to the accessible version.

One of the reasons, one of the things that’s really handy about this is when you’ve had a document that you’re using for a long time. And you’re updating it or you’re refreshing it, you’re doing anything like that. If you’ve just gone through and formatted all the different text styles to a way that you like, then if you’re updating that document and you decide, okay, maybe it’s, maybe because it’s fall, I want things in a nice, you know, burnt umber instead of the orange or, well, instead of a dark yellow that I was using for spring or green that I was using for spring, whatever. You have to go through, find every heading that’s in the color that you originally set it and change them individually.

Where here, okay, so here’s my Heading 3. You can see I’ve got Heading 3 selected up here. Say I want that actually to be, you know, kind of a a nice fall color and maybe I want a different font just to make sure people really see it. When you do that, come up here to Heading 3, Update Heading 3 to Match Selection…. Everywhere in your document, every Heading 3 that’s been defined that way automatically picks up that formatting.

So it makes updating documents much, much easier if you’re using the same documents year after year and revising it that way.

And a side note that just popped into my head and another thing, another reason that using headings helps if you’re exporting your Word documents to PDF, that accessibility information, as long as you Save as PDF, is carried over into the PDF. And those headings are then available, those headings are available within the PDF the same way they are within the Word document.

So again, if you have a master Word document, you send out your syllabi or any other document as PDF, you know in your master document, change things as you want, reformat them however you like. Recreate the PDF, all that accessibility information is still there and you’re ready to go.

Links

Okay. Links. So. I’m going to move my captions a little bit here. For those of us here in the, uh, here. But, I talked about this a little bit already as I was going through the screen reader, but you want to make sure that your links are descriptive linked text and not just bare URLs.

So again, it’s just a matter of trying to read this out loud. First off, this one’s completely unlinked. So even if someone wanted to go there, they wouldn’t be able to just click and go. They’d have to copy that, paste in the address bar of their browser.

Linking it helps, but here it’s just the bare URL. Really, really difficult to read out loud. And if you were to listen to a screen reader read that, there is probably no way that you’d be able to listen to that and really know where it goes or if you were trying to copy it somewhere else manually, you wouldn’t get all the right characters in there.

Next thing, like I said, “click here”. That’s what we try and avoid because you end up with a lot of “click here” in a document when they call up that list of links, they have no idea where any of them are going because there’s no context.

So you want to make sure it’s descriptive. You’re describing where you’re going with that link.

Why am I not…? Okay. And I’ve been kind of going through, hopefully you’re following along and playing. I’m going to pause here for a moment. Are there any questions on what we’ve gone over so far?

Yes. [Inaudible] Mmm-hmm. Yes, if you want. [Inaudible] If you share it as a PDF. Yep.

Question: Does accessibility information in Word end up in a PDF?

The most honest answer to that question is it depends. And basically what it depends on is if the PDF is created correctly.

The first thing—I’m going to take a slight tangent here and say, does it really have to be a PDF?

We, in general, and in academia and the business world, we’ve gotten really, really used to just creating things and we send it out as a PDF because we know nobody’s going to change anything.

Well, a lot of times the question, is that really necessary? If you’re a faculty and you’re setting out your PDFs, your syllabi as PDFs that way, how worried are you, really, that a student is going to take your syllabus, change something in it, and then come back to you and say, “but your syllabus says”. I mean, you’ve got the original. Every other student has the original. You know what the syllabus says. There’s not a lot there.

And sending out original file documents, like sending out actual Word documents or Google Docs documents, actually allows for a lot more accessibility, even just beyond what we’re talking here, because then at that point, say someone is visually disabled, not to the point of being fully blind, but maybe they have color deficiencies or they don’t see well, so they like to blow things up.

If you give them a Word document, they can change the font, they can change the size, they can change the colors, they can do anything they want with the document to make sure that it is the best presentation for them. If they’re getting a PDF, it is locked into that presentation and they don’t have that. The best they can do is zoom in and out.

Word documents on phones can automatically reflow to the smaller size of the phone screen. A PDF, again, they’re trying to pinch and zoom in and out. There are other considerations there. So in general, I like to just to try and get people to think about, does it really need to be locked down as a PDF?

Now, for some things that are very layout dependent, like some of the flyers and the stuff that are made by our Communications and Marketing department, yeah, that kind of does need to be a PDF, otherwise it’s going to get completely wonky. But if it’s primarily a text document, a lot of times just send the Word document. It’s going to work a lot better for everybody.

But if you are creating a PDF, you want to make sure that you, in Word, you need to go Save as PDF to keep that accessibility information, and then your PDF should be accessible. If you use Print to PDF, at that point, Word basically approaches that as if it’s sending the information to a printer. And if you’re printing, you don’t need all the alt text, you don’t need to know the heading levels, and so it strips all of that out and you just get text on a page. So Print to PDF, great if you’re actually printing, but not if you’re distributing that PDF to anybody. You always want to use Save as PDF.

Yes. [Inaudible] Yes. [Inaudible] Yep. [Inaudible]

Question: Is a Google Doc better sent as a link or a Word doc?

Okay, the question—and I think I forgot to repeat your last question, but hopefully context everybody understood what was being discussed there.

Here is a question of, if something’s created in Google Docs, Is it better to download it as a Word document or to just send the Google Docs link?

This is a little bit of personal opinion. But it’s also a little bit not just personal opinion.

I would say it’s better to send a Word document. Google Docs, while you can do things like this and put the accessibility in, Google Docs is not, actually the Google Suite in general is really not that good for accessibility. There are a lot of quirks, a lot of weirdnesses. UW just last year did a presentation at a conference which I missed, but I got a hold of the presentation, looking at the differences between Microsoft’s Office Suite and Google’s application suite and the differences in accessibility. And the TL;DR (too long didn’t read) on that is please use Microsoft Office.

Now, not everybody’s going to. We certainly can’t dictate that. And we are very much a dual Microsoft and Google Campus. So I’m not saying don’t use Google Docs. But keep in mind that if you do end up in a situation where you are working with someone or teaching someone who has accessibility, who uses assistive technology. You may need to adjust things or you may need to send them Microsoft Office versions of whatever you create.

And then along with that, one of the areas where Google stumbles a little bit in accessibility is Google gives you this very nice download as a PDF option. As far as I can tell, and this is guesswork, but as far as I can tell, they’re using Print to PDF thinking when they do that. And so even if you’ve put the accessibility information into your Google Doc, when you download a PDF from Google Docs, it’s all stripped out. And you lose all of it.

If you do do something in Google Docs and you want a PDF out of it, download it as a Microsoft Word doc, and then check it in Microsoft Word and then save as PDF from there.

Anything else before we go on? Yes. [Inaudible]

Question: In email, do links need to be bare in addition to descriptive?

Yeah, Josh was asking about when sending emails, if you’re creating links like this last one with the descriptive text, do you still need to include the full link? Because I know a lot of people like to do that just so people know where a link is going.

I’d say generally, no, you don’t.

Now, if you’re going to do something like that, I’d say include the full links maybe towards the end of the email. So if someone gets to the end and then they start hearing a bunch of links, they know they can just kind of cancel out of that. But I don’t think it’s really necessary, both because it’s descriptive, they should know where they’re going. And in email, just like anywhere else, for a visual user, you can hover over that link and see the full URL that way.

And I believe this is interesting, something I [haven’t] played about. I believe there is a way for screen reader users where if they want to hear the full URL so they know exactly where a link is taking them, I believe they can do that. Although I actually have to check on that. I’m only about like 73% sure on that.

Second question, yes. [Inaudible]

Question: Does email support headings?

It does. The question there was if you’re sending like a long, complex email to a large group of people,
do we want to do the same things with headings and everything?

And if possible, yes, that’s great. If the email is long enough that it needs that kind of structure, that’s great.

It is a little more difficult because Outlook does not, Outlook’s default formatting does not, like the Outlook’s formatting toolbar doesn’t include headers and such. But you can craft the email in Word, copy, paste it, paste it into the email document and then it will retain, excuse me, it will retain the headings there. So yeah, that is a possibility.

Checking accessibility

Okay, so now that you’ve done these things, you want to make sure that your document, you want to take a look and make sure the document is accessible. Word has an accessibility checker built right in, as does Google Docs.

In Word, it’s under the Review toolbar and a button that says Check Accessibility.

So what this does is when you click that, It opens up the pane on the right-hand side of the document, because Microsoft is not at all consistent with where they place things. But it opens a pane on the right side of the document, then it’ll just go through, it’ll just scan through the document and it’ll catch the majority of the most, it’ll catch the most common accessibility issues.

So in this particular case, my example here from that inaccessible document, it’s highlighted this image2.jpg, says it’s missing alternative text. And if you click on the little down arrow next to it, it says, okay, here’s all the things you can do. You can mark it as decorative. You can add a description to it. It’ll suggest a description.

Microsoft, along with everybody else in the world, is playing with AI to analyze images and give you suggested alt text. If you’ve played with AI much, you may already have an idea of how good this is. I do not recommend it. Sometimes I’m kind of impressed. Most of the time, I’m just like, no, partly because it doesn’t always analyze the images well, also because it doesn’t know the context. So like my example earlier, where you might describe this image differently depending on how it was being used. Word doesn’t have that context, so it’s not going to be able to pick up on things like that.

But it’ll scan through your document, find things that it thinks could be improved. And give you suggestions on how to fix them. Doesn’t catch absolutely everything, but it’s a really good, it’s a highly recommended step.

There’s also an option, which I don’t have screenshotted and I don’t remember exactly where, there’s an option somewhere in Word to just keep, you could just keep a little thing open down here at the bottom of your Word window, to just where it’s continually scanning. And as you’re working on a document, it’ll say Accessibility: Investigate. Anytime you see that, you know that there’s something that can be improved. So I find that really handy because then it’s just keeping it in mind as I’m working on the document. And I can just tweak things as I go rather than putting a whole document together. Okay, now I have to go back through and change everything. Different working styles work better for different people. Pick the way that works best for you.

Google Docs does not have an accessibility checker built into it by default. However, Highline subscribes to an extension called GrackleDocs which does provide accessibility checking for Google Docs. So with that.

Under the Google Docs Extensions menu, choose Grackle Docs and Launch. And this should be installed on all Highline computers by default. I am 85% sure that you can find the GrackleDocs extension, install it on your personal computer, if you use your own laptop, and then log into it using your Highline credentials. Like I said, 85% sure on that one.

Once you launch GrackleDocs, again, over on the right-hand pane. It pops open an accessibility checker, scans through the document, looks for common errors and gives you suggestions on how to fix them.

Kind of entertainingly, sometimes if you’re working on a document and you’re bouncing between platforms, it does not catch the exact same stuff as Word’s does. It’s just, no two companies seem to agree on what the most important accessibility stuff to check is. I don’t worry about that terribly much. I just wanted to let you know in case you start playing with them like, well, Word didn’t say this was a problem or Grackle didn’t say this was a problem. Yeah, they don’t always agree, but if it flags something, see what you can do to fix it.

And then I wanted to take a moment, we’re getting toward, and it’s still no questions in chat, so okay.

About Canva

Awesome. I wanted to take a moment and talk about Canva.

Many of you are probably familiar with Canva at this point. It’s a very popular web-based design tool.

But Canva does not produce accessible documents. I do know that they are working on it, and I have seen signs that it’s improving on the back end. But it was a very, very low bar to start with. And so while it’s improving, still, it’s not at a point where it’s that good.

If you’re creating and distributing documents with Canva, you need to know that people using assistive technology are going to have difficulty reading and understanding the document. And that difficulty could range from anything from I can’t read it at all, to, well, the text is there, but it is completely out of order and makes absolutely no sense and I have no idea what’s going on here.

So that doesn’t mean—because I know it’s very popular and it’s free and a lot of people are using it—I’m not really saying don’t use Canva. I’m saying keep in mind what you’re doing with it.

It works really well for creating flyers that you’re printing but you don’t plan to send out electronically. It works well for creating social media graphics because those are usually just like single images or maybe a series of single images. You can create those, you can pop them into social media posts, include the alt text in your social media platform, and you’re good to go. It’s good for promo images that are being sent in email as long as you remember to add the alt text to the image in the email.

So Canva has its uses. But where it really falls apart is in any document that is being saved and then distributed as a PDF.

They can be remediated. And if you have, and I offer remediation services, you can send me PDFs and I will do everything I can to fix them and make them accessible. I’ll come back to that in just a couple moments here. But it’s a lot of work. And of course, if everybody in the school suddenly decides to send me that, I’m not going to be able to support everybody.

If it’s being sent as a PDF, Canva may not be the best option. So this includes newsletters, reports, presentations, basically any complex multi-page document.

Instead of Canva, you have a few options. And I’m going to warn you that right now, I don’t have really good alternatives depending on everything from skill set to budget.

Free, but a little more difficult, we have Microsoft Word. It is primarily a word processor. I think it’s best as a word processor. But it can do a fair amount of page design work. It just takes a little playing with it to figure out how to do it. And it can do it, and you can use Word’s accessibility tools there.

Or Adobe InDesign. Adobe InDesign is a higher end page design application. I know our Comms and Marketing department uses it a lot for all of the posters and flyers and A signs that you see around, a lot of reports, large, complex magazines and reports are also done that way. That does mean it has a steep learning curve.

The advantage for both of these, if you have the ability and time to really start playing with them and figuring them out, is that Highline pays for them. As Highline employees, we have access to both of those.

Much easier, but this one costs money. Venngage is basically Canva, but accessible. It’s the same basic idea. It’s a web page you log into. You’ve got a lot of design elements. You can throw them together.

But they actually care about and support accessibility. They have an accessibility checker built in. They have accessible pre-built templates that you can use. You can do things that are not possible in Canva, like checking and reordering the order of things on a page to make sure that things are being read in the order they’re meant to be read in.

However, the free level of Venngage only creates web pages. PDF export is more expensive, and by that I mean $24 per user per month.

So… This is one of those things that I am, in all honesty, I am recommending as someone, I’m mentioning as someone who has used it and played with it and I can speak to it, but this is not, I do want to caution that this is not an official “Highline says you should use”.

We do not have an account with Venngage. We do not pay for Venngage. Same as with Canva. We don’t have an account for Canva. We don’t pay for people to use Canva. So it’s in that same bucket of, you might be using it, it’s not official. But I wanted to make sure that option was known because you can do accessible stuff with it, but if you need PDF output, you’re either going to need to pay for it yourself, because everybody knows that in education, like 80% of the budget comes out of our own pockets, or see if you can manage to talk someone into paying it for you. But I want to let people know that it’s out there.

PDF remediation

Before I go on to the very end, I also wanted to talk about PDF remediation.

I know there’s probably a lot of faculty who have PDF documents that they’ve been using in classes for a long time, maybe scans of journal articles or old assignments or things like that. Many of those are probably not accessible, especially if they’ve been scanned from physical media. I do have the ability to remediate those documents and make them accessible for you.

If you were to go to, I will drop over to this right very quickly, where’s my browser? Ah, this one.

My, quote unquote, “my” webpage is accessibility.highline.edu. There’s a lot of stuff on here. There’s training and resources. I’ve got news and how to’s where you can get tips on how to make things accessible.

But I also have PDF remediation on here. I have a little information, but if you have documents that you know you’re using in class, you can send them, there’s a linked form here, you can send them to me. And I will do a little work, make sure that they’re accessible or as accessible as I can get them and get them back to you.

Exactly how long that takes will depend on the workload, what I’ve got going on. You know, over the summer might have been a few hours. Over these past few, like if someone had sent me something over these past three weeks at the beginning of the quarter, might be a couple days to the next week. If everybody starts sending me stuff, again, that’s going to start going out. But I do have the ability and we want to make sure that those PDFs are made to be accessible.

I can also do some one-on-one training on how to investigate PDFs, how to check to see whether or not they’re accessible, and the basics on how you can tweak those yourself.

And you’re all free to contact me at any point with questions. I’m just mhanscom@highline.edu. I have weekly Zoom drop-in times, Wednesdays and Thursday afternoons. I picked those because there are fewer classes at that time and people might be more able to spare some time. You can just drop in, ask questions. And I can set up appointments via email.

Like I said, there’s the resources on the accessibility webpage. I’m going to continue to add to those, a lot of times based on questions I’m getting. Like I said, my role here is to help you and all of you make sure that we’re providing accessible materials to everybody.

And that’s what I have. And I have, I think, five minutes to spare. Are there any more questions? I still haven’t gotten anything in chat, so I hope I haven’t put all of you to sleep. Yeah, so I got… [Inaudible]

Question: GrackleDocs flagging headers and footers?

I’m getting a question about headers and footers. Oh, checking something in GrackleDocs. Okay, GrackleDocs is giving an error saying that headers and footers should be used for accessibility.

Honestly, I would have to look at that to have a better idea on what exactly it’s talking about. I don’t know off the top of my head is the best answer to that question. I’d have to see what it’s saying.

Yeah. [Inaudible]

Best, okay, checking the document said that this document has a footer but no header.

My best guess on that off the top of my head is that there’s probably a footer on the document that says like it has like page numbers on it. Just as in Word and Google Docs, you can put headers. So it had just a little basic information about a document in the header of the document.

I would not worry too much about that one, in part because a lot of times headers and footers are ignored by accessible technology, either ignored or only read once. Because it’s information that’s repeated on every page, it would just be annoying to have that pop up, especially if you’ve got text a paragraph that wraps from one page onto the next. You don’t want that paragraph being interrupted by a page header. So a lot of times accessible tech will ignore those.

So that’s an error I wouldn’t worry too much about. But yeah, like I said, I’d have to take a closer look to be more sure of what it was.

And then a gentleman in the back, you had a question. [Inaudible] Yeah. [Inaudible] Right.

Question: How much alt text is too much?

Yeah, so the question is for a very complex technical diagram, how much alt text is right? How much is too much?

The… simple, question mark, but probably trite answer is however much gives the student the information they need to take from that image.

Now, depending on the image, that could be very little. It could be a lot. And, that, actually that that’s great because one of the guidelines that is very, very prevalent about alt text, if you start looking it up on the web, is they say a lot of times alt text will say like, two or three sentences, or it’ll say something like 180 characters. You know, about the length of an old school tweet, um, back when Twitter wasn’t a garbage fire.

That’s basically outdated advice. And that comes from screen readers, especially when they were new, could only hold so much information in their buffer memory. And so if you had a lot of alt text, because the screen reader says “graphic” at the beginning when it starts reading alt text, it might say “graphic”, “graphic”, “graphic”, as it was reading through alt text.

Well, first off, screen readers have gotten better. They’re less likely to do that, although they do still do sometimes. But also screen reader users have gotten more savvy. That’s not really confusing to people. And so they just, okay, they know what that means. They know that the alt text is continuing.

So a lot of times, as a general rule, keep alt text as brief as makes sense for what you’re trying to describe.

I am very active on one of the newer social media platforms, Mastodon. And Mastodon has a very very active and rich alt text community. And people reminding each other to use alt text. And I have seen some absolutely incredible alt text for images on Mastodon, for people who are posting photographs, that will sometimes go into a paragraph or more of detail. Because if you’ve got someone who’s really getting into describing an artistic image that’s been taken, they may really want to get into the deep blues of the sky or the richness, you know, they’ll go on.

And that’s becoming more and more common as people, both as screen reader users are able to read more alt text, and as people in general, as alt text becomes more visible, both from us talking about it, working with it, and as platforms like Mastodon or many of the other social media platforms actually surfacing alt text. So instead of it being hidden behind an image, a lot of times you might now see a little badge on the bottom corner of an image that says “alt” that you can then click on so you as a sighted user can get the same alt text that the visually disabled user does.

So all text is becoming more prevalent. People are understanding it more, and so longer descriptions are becoming more common.

So as a general rule, as short as realistically possible. But if it needs to be long, then sometimes it needs to be long.

[Inaudible]

Question: Do people use AI to generate alt text?

Josh is asking, on some of those wonderful descriptions, are people using AI to create them?

Probably, but usually you can tell. If…you can really tell the difference between AI trying to describe an image and an actual person, especially if it’s like the photographer who took the image or an artist who created a painting, them describing the image.

The artist Michael Whelan, a fantasy sci-fi artist, is active on Mastodon. And I found out at one point it’s actually his assistant, but the assistant has been working with him for decades, does an absolutely incredible job of describing the paintings that he does. And I really, really value following him and many other people who are consistent about alt text because it helps me when I’m thinking about when I need to create alt text, what do I need to put in here? Do I just need to pay attention to the specifics or is this a situation where I want to put more in?

And now I’m seeing things in the chat. Yay, you people are alive and I’m going to take a quick scroll. I know we’re like two minutes over.

Most of this is thank yous. It’s wonderful. Thank you, everybody, for being here. This is great. And very specific chem questions, but drop in to Zoom hours. Okay, awesome.

So thank you very much. I am thrilled that you were all here. This is so much better than the two people I had last year.

And as I said, if there’s ever anything I can do, if I can help or answer more questions, please get a hold of me. Thank you. And for those of you who are here, if you have not signed in, please do.

And thank you very much. [Inaudible]

Okay, give me just a quick second. I’m going to stop the share and I’m going to stop the recording. I’m going to stop all the things.

Where’s my recording button? There it is. Stopped.