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In my web use, I’ve noticed a growing trend to add instructions to more experiences on the web. This week it was more than 250 words on reading a table on a financial web site and another couple hundred words on a calendar control for an airline company.

Most often, this is coming in the form of an ARIA-Label or other hidden text, aimed at explaining how to use the experience with a screen reader in particular. This is typically scoped to some sort of custom control that the site has opted to use.

On the surface, this might sound great. We have some complex experience and want to give users some tips so we’ll jam in a set of instructions. We don’t want to clutter the visual experience with information that isn’t relevant if you are not using a screen reader though, so we’ll hide this info with some web technique we’ve learned about from someplace.

As someone who’s created a number of training videos and other learning content over the years, I recognize the importance and helpfulness a good set of instructions can provide. That said, if you are building an experience where for whatever reason, you find it necessary to add instructions directly into the content, please press the pause button and ask more than once why these instructions are needed.

Often I have found that it is a case that as a “workaround” for not following accessibility guidance instructions are viewed as the solution.

Explaining why you had to break the rules, dressed up as user assistance, does not excuse the rule breaking. In addition, you can write all the instructions you want but that’s no guarantee a user is going to read them.

Even if such instructions are justified, jamming them directly into the middle of the task flow is far from ideal. It seems great on first, second and maybe third use. By about the fifth time you’ve had to use some screen reading command to skip past all these instructions though, you are starting to feel held captive to this inefficient experience.

When talking about accessibility, I will typically share some form of this topic in my presentations. Without fail, audiences will always say that the experience with lengthy instructions seems more accessible when I first compare experiences with and without these sorts of instructions. Then I toss the curve of asking how the same experiences would compare after ten uses of the two. The answers are strikingly different.

This is not to say innovation and creativity are not part of an accessible experience. The exact opposite is true. However, ask yourself if basic tasks such as picking dates, reading a table of information or many other experiences that are common on the web, are the best place to create a control unique to one web site. You are asking users to learn something new specific to your experience and toss out years of learning they’ve likely accumulated when common controls and design patterns are not used.

At minimum, ensure as I say, you press pause and ensure you understand why you are making the choices you are. Put the user front and center and recognize that the user likely wants to get something done, not learn how to use your web site.

If you find you are in a situation where instructions are still warranted, find alternatives to an essay of user education attached to a control. Help links are one great alternative. Find a way, whatever options you choose, to allow a user to stop having to sort through instructions once they are familiar if you absolutely have to use them.

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Keeping up with all the changes in even the Microsoft products I personally use on a regular basis can be a challenge. I say that because I just read about a new function Excel has added to add images to a spreadsheet in a formula and it seems quite handy so far. Full details on the function are in this blog posting.

Screen readers will read the alt text on the image when you navigate to the cell. The Office Accessibility Checker will flag the item as missing alt text if that option is left out of the formula.

The full formula reference is also available

This is a feature in Insider builds of Office 365 at this time. I’m sure the Office team would value feedback if you opt to try this functionality.

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Over the years I’ve assisted multiple people with Outlook and one feature that I commonly use stands above the rest as far as being a time saver that most people seem to have not discovered. Quick Steps allow you to take multiple actions on an email message with just a couple mouse clicks or a single key press.

Office has a comprehensive support article on this feature.

As an example, most know about filters to sort email into different folders. As handy as this can be, I often find I might forget to check a certain folder or otherwise want to read the email before filing it away. With a Quick Step, I can turn this into a single key press. In my case CTRL+Shift+2 is my hotkey to archive any email message. I have five or six Quick Steps I routinely use and the hotkeys for those have become as automatic as CTRL+r for reply or CTRL+f for forward.

One way to start using Quick Steps is to have focus on a message in an Outlook message list in the Windows Desktop version of Outlook and press Shift+F10 and arrow down to Quick Steps. Outlook comes with some default but most likely you will want to create your own. Choose Manage Quick Steps, followed by tabbing to the New button and finally choosing Custom. From that point, choose the actions you want taken on the message, such as moving to a folder, deleting, replying and more. You can apply multiple actions. There is also an option to assign a hotkey. You are limited to key combinations of CTRL+Shift+1-9 here.

One nice benefit of Quick Steps is that it is an Outlook setting that is saved to the cloud if you are using Outlook in an environment with that option. That means as soon as I add my email account to Outlook on a new computer, my Quick Steps are present too.

You can read the support article for more details or give the feature a try and discover how it can save you time as well.

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Several years ago I wrote about how I used Excel to track a fantasy football draft. Everything in that post is still relevant but I wanted to provide a short update.

Most importantly, the spreadsheet I use is now available and updated for 2022. See the instructions sheet in the document for how to use it during a fantasy football draft.

The original post talked about my league having 16 players that each fantasy owner drafts. Over the last five years that number has increased to 18.

The short version of how to use this spreadsheet is to:

1. Update team names on the Teams sheet to reflect players in your league.
2. During the draft, use the Players sheet to track the player selections by entering the team owner and dollar amount for each player drafted on the Players sheet.
3. For the various tracking sheets, most notably, the Auction Tracker, use the Data:Refresh Connections command on the Data ribbon or press CTRL+Alt+F5 to have the sheets update with info from what you enter as the draft progresses.
4. Have fun.

I have made every reasonable effort to verify the accuracy of the formulas and such in this spreadsheet. If you find an issue, please let me know in the comments here or on Twitter, where I am @kellylford.

 

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It is unfortunate that it takes landmark agreements far too often for progress on accessibility in the first place. Several years ago Major League Baseball was heralded for their agreement and commitment to accessibility. Progress was indeed made and I know I was one who commented on the agreement and progress.

The agreement closing date has long past and so the answer to the question about what happens afterword in their case is, “Unlabeled image Unlabeled image /121.svg.” If you don’t like that answer, how about “Unlabeled image Unlabeled image /140.svg?” Both of those answers are taken from www.mlb.com/scores as of this writing, and are how two teams are indicated from the live scoreboard when accessed with multiple screen readers.

They are just two of the more than 370 accessibility failures reported by multiple accessibility auditing tools run on the page. Of course, accessibility tools are just part of the story and I’m a big fan of user testing for accessibility. In this case I’m serving that role and just wanted to look up the score of a ballgame. I guess when I sort out who is represented by 121 or 140, I’ll know the score.

This is not a criticism of the efforts that lead to MLB’s agreement. It is, however, a serious question around what it is going to take to make accessibility matter long after the agreements end because I can assure you representing a baseball team as 121, 140 or any other random nonsense is not accessibility the way I want to experience it.

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At times I want to capture the audio from VoiceOver on a Mac to illustrate a point or otherwise demonstrate something. This is a bit of a hack but I made an interesting discovery when recording some audio on a Mac computer today. I also know there are 3rd party utilities that make this easier.

Although it doesn’t show up in the system input devices when you go to Sound in Mac System Preferences, when you install Microsoft Teams, there is a recording device in some audio applications that does show up.

For example, I use Audacity on the Mac and when I view input sources, there is an entry that says Teams audio. This also shows up in QuickTime when recording audio or video.

Now actually using this as an input source, isn’t quite as easy as just picking the device in the recording application. You also have to:

1. Start a Teams meeting. The Meet Now option works fine.
2. Share some content with Teams and check the option to include computer sound.
   

When you take these two steps, any future actions taken with VoiceOver are captured by the audio recording application. Note other audio isn’t captured in this fashion, such as microphone audio.

As I mentioned, there are 3rd party utilities that work better, including being able to get microphone input and system audio at the same time. However, this is a nice trick to add to the recording toolbox.

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As a part of escaping the chilly Wisconsin winter, my wife and I are staying in a rental condo in warmer weather for for the next several weeks. Using the microwave and water dispenser on the refrigerator today I was reminded of the small but significant things when it comes to accessibility that can bring joy.

Flat touch screen-like control panels are pretty much universal on kitchen appliances these days. I often find myself playing the Button Lottery as it were, pressing random buttons until I get the device to do what I want as a result. When it is early in the day and all you want to do is heat something up or get some water, well I wouldn’t say this rises to the level of a full annoyance but it it does get tedious. Sure, a bit of tape or some other marking that isn’t permanent can be added on strategic buttons but it is just one more thing you have to consider.

Both the microwave and refrigerator in our rental condo are handy because of how Whirlpool, at least on these models, has constructed their version of the control panels. On the microwave, all the buttons have slightly raised outlines of the button shapes so it is easy to figure out the numbers and make strategic guesses about which buttons will stop and start independently. The water dispenser has a control surface that is a feel much like fine-grain sand paper. The shapes of the individual buttons are cutouts that are completely smooth and again lead to easy guesses about which will be water and ice.

Sure, I could point out more that could be done to enhance the accessibility here. I have reduced, not eliminated I suppose, my game of Button Lottery. Still, simple things matter and these small changes make a huge difference in the practical experience of appliance use. It is always nice to be able to start the day where something you are trying to do more or less just works.

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While traveling, I was looking for some over-the-counter medication that I occasionally use. It lead me down one of those rabbit holes you can go down with the Internet.

Whether is a loaf of bread, a pair of shoes or the aforementioned over-the-counter medication I was looking for, I’m always amazed at the quantity in terms of both location and maker of products you can purchase here in the United States. Within 2 miles of my current location, there are at least two pharmacies and a full scale supermarket. The over-the-counter medication I was looking for is available at all of them. But that is not what sent me down the rabbit hole today.

All three of these stores sold electronics of some form. What was I guess striking was between the three of those stores, I could purchase at least 15 different pairs of headphones from at least six different manufacturers.

This eventually led me to part of the U.S. Census Bureaus’ website where you can get reports on overall retail sales.

I recognize this isn’t overly profound, but it is just amazing to me how much stuff is sold overall and all of the locations where you can buy it. It makes me wonder when consumption became such a mainstay of our economic activity.

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I have written several times about accessibility problems with Libby and other apps made available from many public libraries from OverDrive. I am overdue in acknowledging some of the progress that has been made on this front.

OverDrive has detailed many accessibility improvements to the Libby app in a recent blog post that were made throughout 2021. . The company has further outlined upcoming enhancements users can expect in 2022.

The blog post itself is detailed about what’s been done so I won’t restate it here. I will say that the overall experience of using VoiceOver with Libby has improved dramatically to the point of actually being usable.

Thank you to users, libraries, librarians and OverDrive for the progress here. I also want to give a special thank you to the city of Madison, Madison Public Library, staff of the South Central Library System and my city alder Lindsay Lemmer. It was just before COVID really hit the U.S. by force when I had extensive discussions with these individuals and will say that everyone’s response and follow-up was outstanding.

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I have written a few times here about different topics on virtual machine use. Here is a hint on how you might be able to take advantage of images distributed as Hyper-V virtual images, even though there are some issues when trying to boot from these images with a screen reader.

As far as I know and in my direct experience, if you try and use Hyper-V for virtual machine use, there is no audio support until the machine is fully configured and you are signed into a user account on the machine or at the login screen. This means you are not able to use Narrator for things such as OS install. This remains true whether you are installing the OS clean from an ISO file or using a vhd/vhdx hard drive file of sorts that already has the OS installed. In the second case, you still have to go through the last parts of setup for the out of box experience. If someone knows differently, please correct my information.

Recently I was in a situation where I needed to try something and an ISO file to use VMWare, my preferred virtualization solution wasn’t available to me. VMWare has native audio support from the start so you can boot from an ISO and use Narrator for OS install.

In my situation, the only thing I had available to me was the Hyper-V virtual hard drive file. I used sighted assistance the first time I tried working with the Hyper-V file to build my virtual machine. But later in the day, when such assistance wasn’t available and because it isn’t a long-term solution for doing this sort of stuff independently, the idea of converting the Hyper-V hard drive to another format came to me. I used a 3rd party free product called StarWind V2V Converter to convert the Hyper-V drive to a VMWare drive and it worked quite well.

The conversion itself took just a few minutes and as you would expect pretty much involved picking the source file, specifying a destination file and format and then running the conversion. The program works well enough with a screen reader and the conversion took less than two minutes.

Once I had the VMWare hard drive file, I created a new VM machine in VMWare, indicated I would install the OS later and then pointed the virtual machine to my converted hard drive file as the hard drive to use. I launched the virtual machine in VMWare and was delighted to hear Narrator come up to finish machine configuration.

Much as I wish it wasn’t the case, there is always that curiosity I suppose when you try these sorts of things as to whether you are going to get screen reader support or not.

In the spirit of convert it once, convert it twice, I also used this solution to get an ARM version of Windows running on my M1 MacBook Air. This is not a supported environment but there are Hyper-V images available from the Windows Insider program. I was able to download an image on a Windows computer, run the conversion and copy the resulting VMWare hard drive to the Mac and use the same basic technique of pointing the virtual machine to that image for the hard drive.

As I said, this is not a supported configuration and to get network and sound support in particular, I had to connect external hardware to the Mac. I used a USB to ethernet network device and a small USB sound card I keep around for situations like this. I did then get the insider build to run and was able to configure it with Narrator and use it on the M1 MacBook.

There very well may be other ways to accomplish all that I’ve described. I’m sharing my solutions in case others find yourself in a situation where you need to use a Hyper-V image and Hyper-V is not a workable solution.

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