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Here at The Idea Place, I don’t sell products but rather ideas and information. Better yet, the ideas are free for the taking and available anytime. This year, I’ll climb on the Black Friday deal train and offer a few free bonus ideas for your holiday accessibility pleasure.

Promote the Future, Along with the Past

Accessibility conferences, key dates on the annual calendar of accessibility happenings and more are filled with announcements of this or that helpful offering in the accessibility world. This is great and well appreciated. What’s often missing though is any talk of the future and to be clear, explicit commitments and benchmarks to track developments. Yet this is often what customers really want to know.

It is great to promote what you’ve done but for users waiting on accessibility improvements in a web site, application or other experience, knowing when they can expect such to be delivered is perhaps the most empowering thing you can do short of actually making the area accessible. With such information, users can make plans, understand how long they need to use workarounds or otherwise deal with the accessibility gaps. Without such information, hope becomes the only thing available and frankly, hope is not a plan.

Know Your Accessibility

If you are speaking to an audience of any size, whether it is in the accessibility arena or not, know the accessibility of the technology you are speaking about whether it is the focus of your talk or not. The disappointment of hearing about some new experience, only to try it and find it lacks the most basic accessibility, leaves a lasting negative far beyond what you realize. It is better to know the accessibility expectations before you try.

Respectfully point out any known gaps, along with expected dates for correction, out early on. Letting the bad news dribble in for weeks and months serves no positive purpose.

I’ve made a career of working in accessibility but it is only part of what interests me about technology. In many cases you have no idea who is in your audience and what accessibility tools, settings and such they are using. At best you maybe know they want to use whatever it is you are sharing.

Support Accessible Employment

It is great to see companies embracing the concepts of inclusive hiring and starting to actively recruit people from different communities. But opening the doors of employment and having people come through them is really step zero. From benefit programs, workplace tools, attitudes of colleagues and so much more, it is key you actively assess and eliminate barriers. Unless you hired the employee to do this, any barriers they encounter and have to resolve for themselves, take away from the main reasons you hired them. It is not a good place to be, having to struggle to get the task you are hired to do completed and work to make the experience accessible at the same time.

Speaking of accessibility in the workplace, if you don’t know the end-to-end accessibility of your employment experience, it is a good idea to hire someone to assess it and help drive for improvement on a regular basis. There are many benefits to taking a comprehensive approach in areas such as this. It allows for more tracking and accountability, gives employees experiencing accessibility issues a place to report them and get consistent updates and so much more.

Have a Plan

Some aspects of accessibility are simple and require little effort. Others are complicated and have multiple steps needed for success. The best way to ensure you achieve any goals in this space is to have a plan. A good plan will at minimum outline your objectives, owners and expectations for each part of the plan, benchmarks to track progress, clear communication of the plan and the flexibility to adapt to changing conditions. Mysteries make for fun reading but not for what’s going on with accessibility.

Be Adaptable

Accessibility, like pretty much any aspect of technology, is under a constant state of change. This is true not just for the how of making something accessible, but also the expectations of what’s possible in accessibility. You need to be adaptable to that reality. Embrace learning, monitor what’s happening and adapt. There was a time when the prevailing expectation by some was that a flat screen using just touch on a device wouldn’t be usable for example by people who are blind. That expectation was shattered years ago and today any device missing this basic accessibility would be considered simply unacceptable.

Involve Users in Meaningful Ways

There is no better source of both what’s needed and how it should work then the populations using technology. Find ways to involve your customers. Sometimes that means you need to be creative. For example, if all you have are designs and wire frames, you might have to find ways to properly describe those items to users who do not see. Having personally been involved in such processes multiple times, I can tell you once everyone involved embraces this reality, it is amazing the learning that happens.

Try It, You’ll Probably Like It

The ideas here are just a few to spark your thinking. Some might be right for your organization, some might make little sense. The key is to try something and hopefully a few of these ideas. Learn what works and do more of it. Learn what doesn’t work and try something else. Accessibility is an ongoing process and that is just great.

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If you’ve ever opened a book to a random page and jumped into the middle of action where you know little about the characters, plot, or anything else, then this short posting might seem familiar.

I work with a range of programs and technologies pretty much daily at Microsoft. One of the areas I’ve been working in a great deal lately is with the team responsible for Power BI. If you’ve never heard of this technology, the short version is that it makes creating presentations of data from a wide range of sources possible with predefined containers, known as visuals, for displaying that information. This can be everything from tables two other grids along with a wide range of chart types, such as pie charts, bar charts and many others.

Today when you use the table, visual it has some issues with screen readers. Although the information is present, it is communicated in such a way that it has several key challenges.

The tables today can best be thought of as simulated tables. For accessibility purposes, this means that the text from each cell in the table is communicated as an alert as you navigate. It also means in braille text shows up as what screen readers call a “flash” message. Functionally the text disappears in a few seconds. In addition, you are not able to review the text without moving away from and back to a given cell with a screen reader and speech. Last, the tables in particular require you to turn off any screen reader virtual mode and use Power BI navigation to interact.

One of the strengths of Power BI is that it is quite easy for a Power BI report author to take information from one visual and convert it to another. In fact it is typically just a matter of selecting the visual and choosing a different type of visual and making any adjustments for the particular chart or other item.

Because my work requires me to access a wide range of information in Power BI( and because part of my current job has me working with the Power BI team to improve on the accessibility, I’ve been creating a number of reports. I’ve found a handy simple change that I wanted to share here because it can make a big difference in using information from a Power BI report with a screen reader.

Again, remember I said this post was like jumping in the middle of a book so if none of this makes sense, file it away as one of those things that might come in handy if you start working with Power BI.

By changing my Power BI tables to what the product calls a multi-row card, I can dramatically improve the speech and braille access to the information. You still need to turn off any virtual mode for best access but all the information from each row of the table is now available for full review in both speech and braille. It does not disappear.

By default, in the multi-row card situation, each piece of data is prefaced by what used to be the column header for that table column. However, Power BI allows you to rename the column headings. While you are not able to fully eliminate them, I’ve found that renaming each column heading to a period, again makes this a much improved reading experience.

The end result, with these two changes is that you get a reading experience very similar to list-views in places like File Explorer in Windows or message lists in multiple email programs. All the data from a row in a table is combined into one single collection of information and the column headers are eliminated. When you are reading through row after row of information, repetition of the column headers is needless noise.

This technique may not be suitable for widespread report distribution and as I said in my day job I’m working with the team in this area. But if you need to use Power BI reports for yourself or can work with a report author to explore this technique, it can make a big difference.

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I’ve written a few times here about virtual machines. VMWare has just added a new entry into the tools available with a technical preview for VMWare Fusion running on Apple silicon hardware. Full details and a download are available in this blog post.

So far my trial of the preview has been quite successful. The software itself works for me as well as it has on Intel-based Macs with VoiceOver. Creating VMs, management of the machines and the other tasks you would want to do are all working well.

The preview doesn’t seem to support automatic OS install so when installing an OS on a virtual machine, you’ll need to go through a manual install. I had no issues doing this with two different Linux distributions and have them working with both speech and braille and the Orca screen reader.

Given Orca, like many other screen readers, uses the caps lock key as a screen reader key, you’ll want to use VMWare preferences to assign another key as caps lock. I personally assign the accent key on the top left of the keyboard as this key and it works great.

As far as I know, there is not a Windows ISO one can use here. If I find differently, I’ll update but based on what the Windows Insider pages say, I think Windows for ARM isn’t available for this sort of a scenario.

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In the ways I monitor accessibility, it is clear that there is a greater awareness of the topic and more effort being put into making technology accessible. This is good.

Yet, the vast majority of accessibility policies still fail at what for me is one of the most fundamental needs. Specifically what is a user supposed to do when an accessibility issue is encountered?

I’m using the term “accessibility policy” here as a broad definition. It is more than just the words and phrases that appear in some document posted on a web site or other location. In theory those are just the outward signs of a range of processes and more that lead to an organization being able to actually have an accessibility policy.

I recognize that definition can be a stretch. In fact, often the reason for the failure I describe here is because the “accessibility policy” is just words and not something embedded throughout the organization.

Far too often, if a policy tells a user what to do, those instructions are geared toward how to report an issue. While this is obviously helpful, it does nothing to solve the user’s immediate need. You are asking the user to invest time in reporting an issue at the very time that user is likely the most frustrated with an experience you have created.

For me, a robust accessibility policy will go beyond this. The policy should not simply ask the user for information. It should offer an alternative way, when at all possible, for the user to get the information or task completed they were attempting when they hit the barrier.

One of my favorite questions, even today, is still why? Why are you posting your accessibility policy for example? Is it to comply with a government regulation, to provide users with information or what?

Similarly, as a user, why do I look for accessibility policies? In my case it is typically to find how I should report issues but also to see if the organization has some alternative way of task completion when I hit a barrier. It can also serve as a reflection of the organization’s overall philosophy on accessibility.

As much as I wish the frequency of accessibility issues I encounter was reduced, I’m realistic enough to know that’s not likely any time soon. I can come to grips with that at some level but not the leading a user with no alternative. That is where organizations should look within and recognize accessibility issues are going to happen and users need to be given paths to success when they do.

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Yesterday I read about the team at WebAIM releasing a version of their popular Wave toolbar as an Edge browser extension. I’m very familiar with the tool so wanted to see how it behaved in Edge.

On the page with details about the extension, there is a section talking about how to use the tool. I noticed that it said you could press ctrl+shift+u, so after installing for Edge that’s what I dit. I pressed ctrl+shift+u and imagine my surprise when the page I was on started to be read aloud.

This is one of those things lumped into the category, I knew this but kind of forgot it in the moment. Ctrl+shift+u in Edge is the hotkey to do exactly what happened, that is start reading the current web page with Edge’s Read Aloud feature.

I had also noticed in the instructions for using the Wave toolbar a comment saying you could change the shortcut in Edge on the Manage Extensions page. My days of working on web browsers exclusively have long past so I wasn’t actually aware you could change the shortcuts assigned to extensions in Edge. I certainly am now. I wanted to share how you can quickly do this when using a screen reader, although the same basic process works without a screen reader as well.

The fastest way to get to the Manage Extensions page is to press ctrl+l on Windows or CMD+l on a Mac and enter edge://extensions in the browser address bar. This opens an Edge page showing you all the extensions yu have installed with options for the extensions.

Initially I was a bit stumped at this point because I was not finding anything about changing keyboard shortcuts. I was using the JAWS screen reader at the time and as with any web page, the Virtual PC cursor was on.

I’ll spare most of the details about how screen readers work, the different modes and more for now and hopefully talk about that in a separate posting. The short version of what I discovered is that there is a tree-view on this page you can use between listing extensions and managing the keyboard shortcuts for those extensions. You need to use that control and change to the Keyboard Shortcuts entry.

In the default way Narrator and NVDA present this page, both options from the control are shown in the Scan Mode (Narrator) and Browse Mode (NVDA) view. You can press enter on the choice you want. With the Virtual PC Cursor on, JAWS currently shows a nameless tree-view you need to press enter on to turn Forms Mode on and then adjust the control. You’ll need to turn Forms Mode off as well. With Forms Mode on, the values as you arrow up and down are properly read so Arrow down once to Keyboard Shortcuts and press enter. As of now, I did not try this page with VoiceOver on the Mac.

Once you change the Manage Extensions page to show keyboard shortcuts, there are a series of edit boxes where you can assign or adjust the keyboard shortcuts being used. These behave like typical edit boxes. Since I just learned about this functionality, my information may not be 100% accurate but I believe you can use either Control or Alt along with a shortcut key key here. I also believe you can add shift to either control or alt. For example, I made my shortcut for activating the Wave toolbar ctrl+shift+w. When a shortcut key has been assigned, a clear button becomes available if you want to remove it.

As a side benefit of all of this, I did discover that Accessibility Insights, an extension I use frequently, allows for multiple keyboard shortcuts for different functions of the tool.

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Earlier this month I was part of a panel presentation at the American Council of the Blind’s summer convention. The panel spoke on financial literacy. My portion of the session dealt with using Microsoft Excel to create pivot tables and using what are known as datatypes in Excel with a screen reader. I wanted to make the materials from that presentation available. Resources include:

1. Audio of my part of the presentation.
2. A Word document containing the text of the presentation.
3. A plain text transcript of the presentation.
4. An example spreadsheet with pivot tables.
5. A sample spreadsheet using datatypes for stock information.
   

Additional Resources

You can obtain more details on the features of Excel discussed in the presentation at the following locations:

1. Creating Pivot Tables
2. Excel Datatypes – Stocks and Geography
3. List of datatypes in Excel
4. Excel Stock History Function
5. Sample Templates Using multiple data types
6. Creating drop-downs in Excel using data validation
7. Tables in Excel.
   

Pivot tables have been invaluable for me in Excel for many years. It is well worth the investment of time to understand how to create them.

The newer datatypes in Excel make getting a great deal of information on multiple topics relatively straight forward. Stocks and geography are just the beginning.

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Monday will mark the 31st anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Each year as another year goes by and we celebrate the signing of the legislation, I am torn between feeling celebratory and sad.

I do feel celebratory about the fact that the work of many allowed us to reach this point. As someone who has worked on various accessibility efforts over the years in a small way, I know all too well the toil, endless negotiations and so much more that happens to make progress. So congratulations for sure to those involved in getting this landmark legislation passed and sustained. That is assuredly worth acknowledgement on a grand scale.

I urge anyone reading this to read the congressional findings that are listed in the legislation. Like a lot of civil rights legislation, they detail that as a class, in this case one to which I belong, people with disabilities are not treated very well and in fact that’s an understatement. Frankly we suffer a staggering amount of outright discrimination and I’m of the opinion that far too often the level of discrimination people with disabilities experience is drastically softened when speaking about the reality of life in the U.S. today.

I know from numerous firsthand experiences, calling something discriminatory makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But trust me, experiencing the actual discrimination has that and more consequences.

So great, celebrate the reality that we have a law that at least gives some hope if that is your choice. I understand that perpetual exposure to commentary that it is all trouble can be tough to experience. But while you are celebrating, just remember, it isn’t as if in passing any of the amendments to the ADA or other legislation, congress has said any of the eight findings they list have gone away. So if hearing that there are multiple challenges is tough or that something seems discriminatory, just remind yourself that the following are still part of the society we’ve created here in the U.S. according to our own congress.

The Congress finds that

(1) physical or mental disabilities in no way diminish a person’s right to fully participate in all aspects of society, yet many people with physical or mental disabilities have been precluded from doing so because of discrimination; others who have a record of a disability or are regarded as having a disability also have been subjected to discrimination;

(2) historically, society has tended to isolate and segregate individuals with disabilities, and, despite some improvements, such forms of discrimination against individuals with disabilities continue to be a serious and pervasive social problem;

(3) discrimination against individuals with disabilities persists in such critical areas as employment, housing, public accommodations, education, transportation, communication, recreation, institutionalization, health services, voting, and access to public services;

(4) unlike individuals who have experienced discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, religion, or age, individuals who have experienced discrimination on the basis of disability have often had no legal recourse to redress such discrimination;

(5) individuals with disabilities continually encounter various forms of discrimination, including outright intentional exclusion, the discriminatory effects of architectural, transportation, and communication barriers, overprotective rules and policies, failure to make modifications to existing facilities and practices, exclusionary qualification standards and criteria, segregation, and relegation to lesser services, programs, activities, benefits, jobs, or other opportunities;

(6) census data, national polls, and other studies have documented that people with disabilities, as a group, occupy an inferior status in our society, and are severely disadvantaged socially, vocationally, economically, and educationally;

(7) the Nation’s proper goals regarding individuals with disabilities are to assure equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency for such individuals; and

(8) the continuing existence of unfair and unnecessary discrimination and prejudice denies people with disabilities the opportunity to compete on an equal basis and to pursue those opportunities for which our free society is justifiably famous, and costs the United States billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses resulting from dependency and nonproductivity.

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When you want to assist someone else with a computer problem on Windows, there are a range of connection options. Some, such as an actual phone call, are easy to establish but difficult to use for this sort of a situation. Others, like Quick Assist, offer the best of all worlds in most cases where establishing the connection is easy and the access you have on the remote computer works quite well. However, Quick Assist does not currently support redirection of audio as far as I know, so if you are using a screen reader, it can obviously be difficult to use.

In the screen reader case, especially if the individual giving the assistance is using a screen reader, there’s not a great way to easily know what’s happening on the remote computer. That said, combining a couple pieces of technology, something I’m sure is no surprise to pretty much anyone who uses a screen reader, can be one potential work around if you want to use this connection option.

The Scenario

You, the screen reading user, want to aid someone remotely. That person may or may not be a screen reading user. In the old school phone call method, even if you use newer voice-over-IP technology, such as Skype, Teams, Zoom, or the never-ending products that seem to appear, you obviously have no direct control over the remote computer. Asking the individual you are trying to assist to type commands and such and read the output only goes so far.

The Quick Assist Solution

Establishing a Quick Assist connection is straight forward. Both individuals launch the Quick Assist app, which comes as a part of pretty much all Windows 10 installations. The person helping requests a six-digit code that they share with the person receiving help. The person providing help also indicates how much control they want to request. For our example this would be full control. The person receiving help will enter the six-digit code provided and approve the full control request. The pin requests, pin entry, control request and control approval all appear as web content so work quite well with screen readers.

The Wrinkle

As mentioned before, Quick Assist does not support audio redirection. To work around that situation, again you can combine a bit of technology.

1. On either the computer providing help or the computer receiving help, create a meeting or other connection with your program of choice that allows for screen sharing. You will want to be sure to use a program that supports sharing of system audio as well. As I’m sure many blog readers know, I am a Microsoft employee, although this is my personal blog, so tend to use Microsoft Teams but Zoom and other programs will work equally well here.
2. Both individuals involved in the assistance should then join the meeting or other connection.
3. The person wanting help next starts a screen share from within the call or meeting. It is key to include the system audio. This will create the environment, where the person offering the assistance who is for our scenario a screen reading user, is going to hear the remote audio.
4. Now establish the Quick Assist connection, including the person to provide assistance requesting full control and the person wanting assistance granting such control.

The Additional Wrinkles

Any time you are establishing a remote connection between two computers, the issue of how and when keyboard commands, touch gestures or mouse clicks go to the remote or local computer requires attention. In my trials of Quick Assist thus far, when you first establish the full connection, keyboard commands for me stayed with the local computer. Using various screen reader commands and techniques, I had to find part of the Quick Assist window on my computer and activate that area. The area was labeled something like Remote Input. I was able to get to this area with the JAWS cursor, NVDA object navigation or Narrator previous and next commands in those programs. Activating the input area with the appropriate command in the screen readers allowed sending keyboard commands to the remote computer. At that point I could use all the standard commands on the remote computer, such as ctrl+win+enter to launch Narrator. Again, our scenario is that a screen reading user is providing help and the person receiving help is not and likely doesn’t even have anything beyond Narrator installed.

One other item of note once you are using the remote computer. So far in my use of Quick Assist, I could not find a way to get keyboard commands to go back to the local computer without having the person receiving assistance end the connection. I did try some of the standard commands I use when working with a standard remote desktop connection and they did not seem to work. This may be a knowledge gap on my part or a limitation of Quick Assist. As I learn more I’ll update with additional details.

Using The Remote Computer

The process of creating this connection sounds more complicated than it is once you do it a couple of times. In my experience, getting the remote computer audio from the screen sharing in Teams or another app, and using Quick Assist to control the remote computer worked well. There was a slight, very slight, lag from the time I used my keyboard commands until I heard the result but it was far better than trying to ask the other person to type a range of commands. I found the environment quite usable to help solve problems.

Alternatives and More

This is not the only solution to this problem of course. If both parties in the connection are using the same screen reader, solutions such as JAWS tandem or equivalents where they exist, are better alternatives. Also, you could opt to forgo the screen sharing part of this process for the audio and just listen to the audio from the remote computer over the voice connection you are using. Likely there are other options I’ve not thought of too but I offer this as one more possible option when you want to help others out of a computer jam remotely, especially when you are using a screen reader and the person needing help is not.

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