Teleconference Details

AGENDA for Friday, 3-07-08 (finish PowerPoint, begin with PDF)

REMAINING POWERPOINT TOPICS

1. Audio clips (Kostas Yfantis, Nolan Crabb)

• Playing audio clip at user's request vs autoplay
• Is the content of audio available in text? (needed for blind)

2. Video clips (Marsha S., Lisa Fiedor)

• Playing video clips at user's request vs autoplay
• Is the content of video available in text? (needed for blind)
• Is the video clip captioned and synchronized? (needed for hearing impaired)

3. Charts: (Kostas Yfantis, Nolan Crabb)

• Use Powerpoint tools to create charts
• Provide chart data in a table
• MS Word BP applies?

4. Record narration (Nancy Swenson, Nolan Crabb)

• What is Record narration?
• Are there any potential accessibility problems with it?

5. Grids and Guides (Norma Scagnoli, Cheryl Todd)

• What are Grids and Guides?
• Are there any potential accessibility problems with grids and guides?

PDF TOPICS (with revised research teams)

1. PDF USE & HISTORY (Vance Martin & Phil Kragnes)

• Why use PDF? When is PDF necessary or desirable?
• Why would an instructional designer use PDF?
• Brief history of why PDF was originally invented.
• Pros and cons of PDF (e.g., author-determined content display vs. end user-determined liquid design).

2. SCANNED PDF DOCUMENTS (Anne-Marie Armstrong & Don Amos)

• What are scanned PDF documents?
• Can they be made more accessible? How?

3. TAGGING: (Cath Kilcommons & Marsha S.)

• What are the major differences between tagged and untagged PDF documents?
• From the standpoint of creating accessible documents, how well does tagging work?
• How easy is it to apply tagging?

4. AUTHORING TOOLS: (Vance Martin & Phil Kragnes)

• Are there other apps besides Adobe for creating accessible PDF documents?
• PDFCreator?
• Save as PDF option in OpenOffice?

5. DOCUMENT TYPE & CONVERSION: (Cheryl Todd & Kristen Freilich)

• Is converting to html still the best way of making PDF documents accessible?
• How easy is it to create html documents from PDF documents?
• How easy is it to make an existing PDF document accessible?
• What steps are needed?

6. SECURITY FEATURES: (Christy Blew & Ken Petri)

• Do PDF document security features interfere with some assistive technologies?
• How?

7. INTERACTIVE FORMS (Christy Blew & Ken Petri)

• How accessible are PDF interactive forms?
• What steps can be taken to ensure accessible PDF forms?

8. SCROLLING, NAVIGATION (Christie Gilson & Nancy Swenson)

• Scrolling in PDFs--any access issues here?
• Keyboard navigation issues?
• Interference between Adobe shortcuts and screen reader shortcuts (e.g., functions such as Next, Previous when JAWS is loaded)?
• Paging status and control (e.g., page 1 of 9)—readable by JAWS with most recent version of Adobe reader?

9. COLOR & CONTRAST CONSIDERATIONS (Nolan Crabb & Konstantinos Yfantis)

10. FORMATTING EFFECTS (Nolan Crabb & Konstantinos Yfantis)

• For example, bold, italics, etc.

11. TABLES & COLUMNS (Cheryl Todd & Kristen Freilich)

• How are tables and columns handled in PDF?
• Are tables created in PDF accessible?

12. IMAGES & ICONS (Cath Kilcommons & Marsha S.)

• What accessibility issues exist for images and icons in PDF documents?
• How can we work to address these issues?

13. DISPLAYING DOCUMENTS (Christie Gilson & Nancy Swenson)

• Configuring adobe reader to display PDF in Adobe & not in browser environment (why and how).

14. ADOBE'S ACCESSIBILITY CHECKER (Chris Dobson & Lisa Fiedor)

• Quick & Full check.
• How well do they work?
• What do they miss?

MINUTES FROM 2-22-08 BPDCC

Participants Present:

• Marc Thompson
• Don Amos
• Anne-Marie Armstrong
• Kristen Freilich
• Christie Gilson
• Cath Kilcommons
• Phil Kragnes
• Vance Martin
• Hadi Bargi Rangin
• Cheryl Todd

The biweekly conference call of the BPDCC was held on Friday, February 22nd. The main topic of the meeting was reviewing excellent research conducted by many BPDCC members about best practices for PowerPoint presentations.

Marc convened the group at approximately 1:10 CST. After introductions, Marc urged us to look at the BPDCC website located at
http://uiuc.edu/goto/bpdcc/

We discussed the criteria used to team members together for research purposes. A decision was made that all subsequent research work should be submitted to the listserve, rather than to Marc or Hadi so that all members can review it. From now on, research teams are requested to put all their results into the, “what, why, how, reference, cross-reference, and examples” format to standardize its appearance and to increase its usefulness. Previously-prepared research documents will be posted to the aforementioned website, and the listserve will be used for discussion of current work being undertaken.

Kristen drew our attention to a resource:
The National Center on Disability and Access to Education
http://ncdae.org/

Within our PowerPoint topic for the day, the following subtopics were discussed by group members.

PowerPoint Topics Discussion

• Kristen gave us some pointers on the proper use of backgrounds.
• The group determined that slide footers should contain information on which slide of a total number of slides a slide represents. So, slide three of a ten-slide presentation might have a footer of, “Slide 3 of 10”.
• Cheryl informed us of an excellent, fairly inexpensive resource for making PowerPoint presentations more accessible:
  www.lecshare.com
• Anne-Marie and Vance provided best practices for the proper titling of slides. We determined that, at this point, text boxes are not accessible as part of a PowerPoint presentation.
• Phil alerted us to a concern with the switching of languages within a PowerPoint presentation. Screenreaders currently do not always detect language changes within PowerPoints.
• Don and Christie will collect issues to bring to assistive technology vendors which we feel they may be able to address.
• Don covered the proper markup of tables in PowerPoint, which largely mirrors proper markup in Word.
• Cheryl explained the best colors to use when creating PowerPoint presentations.
• Cath outlined best practices for fading. Minimal use of fading is recommended.
• We would discourage the use of timed rehearsals of PowerPoint presentations when making them available publicly.
• Four topics within PowerPoint remain to be discussed at our next meeting on March 7, 2008. We will also begin the discussion of the creation of accessible PDF’s.