The Idea Place Posts

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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