- [Mike] Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining, we're going to wait a few minutes while people log in, hang tight. Everyone is muted and will remain muted for the session. Good morning, good afternoon everyone. My name is Mike Mooney. I'm the digital marketing manager at TPGi. Thanks everyone for joining us today. We're really excited about this session on making an accessible Excel workbook with Aaron Farber. I want to go over a few housekeeping items before we get started, first off, this session is being recorded and we will email everyone the recording after the event, we have live captions available, so please feel free to utilize those as needed. We will have time, hopefully for live Q and A at the end of the session. So if you have any questions, please use the Q and A box available and we will get to those at the end. And lastly if anyone needs any accessibility support or training, our team's happy to help you out with your Excel documents. And so I'll follow up after the session with any relevant links for you. And with that, I will allow Aaron to introduce himself and kickoff the webinar.

- Hey, good morning, everyone. My name is Aaron Farber. I'm an accessibility engineer at TPGi. My pronouns are he or they, and I live in Los Angeles. I'm really excited for you to join me today. The topic today is "Making An Accessible Excel Workbook". Okay, so we'll get right into the agenda. We're covering a lot of things in a short time today, I'm excited. So first we start with an introduction. Then we're going over just the general structure, the structure general structure of an Excel workbook. Then we're going over tables and how to correctly expose them to screen readers. Then we're discussing the use of color within Excel. For the fifth topic we're discussing graphs and charts. And then we're discussing the Accessibility Checker and Documents Inspector, which are testing tools built into Excel. And then finally, we're going to have a conclusion where we go over, whether the CAG applies to Excel. We'll talk about whether Excel is appropriate for your task here. And discuss kind of the exciting new features that Excel has released in the last few years through an accessibility lens. So let's get started. So Excel of course, is a program for viewing and comparing data mainly. And people use it in a wide array of industries and their personal life, you know, for managing budgets, for viewing economic data. You know so many functionalities, you know, so first off, you know, what is an accessible documents? An accessible document is one that every person can read, understand, and interact with in a comparable experience. For example, in a similar amount of time or level of expertise in the program, each person should be able to use it within that same range. Now, you know, accessible documents can have a huge impact on people's employment, on their ability to understand their health and finances. And you know, today what I want to show to everyone is that when we create a workbook with accessibility in mind, we don't just make a workbook that more people can use. We make a better workbook. And when we design accessible workbook, it provides a foundation for so many of Excel's more robust features. Okay, but before we get started understand, this presentation focuses on making a workbook accessible to people with low vision or blindness. Know there is a wide range of disabilities and spectrum of assistive technologies. We're covering mainly this frame. So you know, of course the largest group, you know, disabled group is people with intellectual or cognitive disabilities. You know this, although some of the lessons today will apply to that as well, the focus is on low vision or blindness. Now, in Excel, there are numerous ways to achieve each task. Understand during this presentation, multiple approaches are valid. What I recommend is not the only way to achieve accessibility in a particular feature. Next, you know what CAG standards can, it can be mapped to Excel workbooks. So well CAG of course governs web content, but the principles of CAG, can be, we can see, apply to Excel. And if we have developers in the audience, people that are experienced implementing with CAG, I think they'll see a lot of parallels in making Excel workbooks accessible. Okay, so first let's go over some kind of just general considerations for these user groups. Just kind of to understand how they generally use an Excel workbook. So people with low vision, they may have challenges discerning text or elements within charts, you know, which have low color contrast. Another issue that people with low vision may have is they may be magnifying the workbook, which necessary necessitates more scrolling and seeing less content at once. So we can think of how that applies to, you know, how much content we want within a workbook. Next people with blindness primarily navigate using the cursor keys to move one cell, and one direction at a time. Of course, a sighted person, they look at a spreadsheet, they see all of the contents, all the placement of the different elements within the worksheet. For screen reader users, It is a different experience, you know, moving one cell at a time. This is a theme that we're going to see, we're going to talk about a lot today. Now, another thing to understand about, you know, screen reader users, blind folks that use Excel is that, Excel's very robust functionalities can be accessed using the most popular screen readers, but on a practical level, people may not know the full range of keyboard commands. So you know, when the goal is to actually, so something can be technically accessible, but not usable. So that's another thing to kind of keep in mind today as we're going through it. Okay, first of all, let's talk about structure, the general structure of a workbook. The first thing to do here is give each worksheet a unique descriptive name. The sheet names should provide information about what is found in the worksheet. And the worksheet name is a very important feature in orienting users to the purpose of the worksheet, and understanding its primary content. So as we can see here in the examples, you know, don't use default sheet names, sheet one, sheet two, these are not descriptive. Also do not use not-human-readable text. As we can see in that example, you know, this is particularly an issue I find with APIs, and things like that generate Excel output. A lot of times I find they're not configured in a way to have a readable worksheet name. Now, here, we can see an accessible example. We see concise and descriptive names, 2019 overview North America sales, UK sales. There's no doubt as to the primary content within that worksheet. And this is just a great first step here. Okay. So really key aspect of the structure of a worksheet is do not leave cell A1 blank. Cell A1 is a critical landmark for structure and navigation. So we start content at A1. When a screen reader user enters a worksheet, the first selected cell is A1. It may not be clear to screen reader users where the rest of the content is within the spreadsheet. So cell A1 should be used to orient users to the structure of the workbook or the worksheet. So let's look at some examples. Okay. So the first example here is when the sheet contains just a single table, use A1 to provide a title for the table. It's very straightforward. Avoid blank rows between the title and A1 and the table. Again, when a screen reader user is moving one cell at a time, you know, it's not immediately clear to them what the next cell is going to be, where they're supposed to go. So to move things in a straight line to have things, you know, without a lot of unused rows between them really aid screen reader users, before we do anything more advanced, that's a huge aid. Example two, when the workbook or worksheet has a more complex structure, that means it can have many, it could have multiple worksheets or a worksheet could contain multiple tables, use A1 to provide a text summary. The text summary should describe the workbook or worksheet structure. Now, when the sheet has multiple tables or sections, you know, the summary should state the cell where each element starts. Because again, you see we're addressing that issue of screen reader users navigating one cell at a time. We really want to make them clear, explain to them the layout of the workbook. And the summary should know if the worksheet contains any charts or graphs, images, anything interactive, or a irregular, something that, you know, a person might not be accustomed to viewing in an Excel spreadsheet. Such as, you know, a form or some macro. Okay, let's look at an example here. Okay, so here we see a worksheet with a couple of elements. We see that in cell A1, we have a text summary before we get into that, let's look at the rest of this table. We have a table for historical client performance. We have a chart, line chart, displaying the information from that table. And then we have a disclaimer, you know, below the table providing boiler plate language about investments. So let's look at the text summary here in A1. The worksheet contains a table displaying client performance and a line chart displaying the value of total holdings over time, investment disclaimer, cell A11. Now my rationale in this example for why we state the location of the investment, disclaimer, is because a lot of users, I believe after they reached the end of the table, they kind of intuitively expect that the content is over with in the spreadsheet. And so we're making it clear that no, there is more content beyond it. Now in certain cases, you know, there are trade-offs within accessibility and UX, For some, perhaps the text summary to have it visually shown can be unwieldy or kind of add, increase the cognitive burden of the spreadsheet. So it is an option to set the font color to white, in effect, making the text only for screen reader users or you know, it's visually hidden. Someone would have to select the cell to see that content. Now, again here are trade-offs and for me personally, I think that the text summary is of help to all people, especially people, you know, that may be neuro divergent or again, unsure of how to navigate the spreadsheet. So, it it's something that doesn't just aid screen reader users. Okay. Now, you know, of course, with any topic about structure, one of the most powerful tools we can do to make it more accessible is to just simplify our workbook. When a worksheet has multiple sections or tables, separate each element by a single row, avoid multiple blank rows and columns in between elements. Because again, it's not clear which directions for a screen reader user to move within the spreadsheet. Now, when multiple rows separate elements, screen reader users, they may reach the end of a table or a section, you know, some feature within the worksheet and not know that there is more content further down the worksheet. We saw that in the previous example with the legal disclaimer. Okay. Now, one thing we can do to help prevent screen reader users from wandering into parts of the worksheet that do not have contents that they're basically not meant to, is we can hide unused rows or columns outside what I call the working area. Now, you know, this has multiple benefits, you know, it's not just aiding screen reader users. It also reduces the workbooks file size making the file more performative. Of course Excel has something like 20,000 rows, 20,000 columns. This is a huge amount of content when we make it smaller, we can again reduce the burden of loading the file. So this is again, something that benefits all users. Now, some caveats, things to understand about this phrase, hiding unused rows and columns, do not hide rows or columns within the working area. So we are talking about creating a box, basically around our working area, nothing outside of that box to be exposed to screen readers or other users. When we hide rows and columns within the spreadsheet within the table, it interferes with people's understanding of the grid and the actual keyboard, and now screen or users can un-hide columns and things like that, but it's difficult. They may not be, they're unlikely, they may very well not be aware of the keyboard shortcuts on how to do that. So again, on a practical level, do not hide rows and columns within the working area, it's known to cause issues. And following on that logic is, do not merge cells. This disrupts the screen reader users's navigation, and understanding of where they are located within the spreadsheet, you know, it's really ingrained in our minds that it's a grid, you know, one by one by one grid. Okay, so now let's look at how we actually hide unused rows and columns. And as I start, I want to emphasize again that there are multiple ways to achieve every task within Excel. So sometimes I favor using the ribbon. Other times, I favor using keyboard shortcuts. You know, I do whatever is kind of easier for myself. So step one, select a row or column outside the working area. So it can be, you know, the next column after the table, or you can have one blank column, and then the one after that, as we have in the picture here. So you select that column in this example, and then you can press control + shift + right, and that will select all columns to the worksheet's end. Or we could select a row underneath the table, press control + shift + down to select all the rows to the sheet's end. Whichever we're trying to hide rows or columns. Then in the home tab, in the ribbon, we select format and we select hide or un-hide, and then we hide rows, or hide columns, whichever we're doing at that point in time. You have to do each one individually. You can't do them at the same time. All right next, onto tables. Such a critical part of Excel. If I want people in this presentation to take away anything from today, it is this section. One thing that is critical for aiding screen reader users is to identify tables and define row and column headers. Correctly marking up a table dramatically improves navigation for screen reader users. Without table structure, it is easy for screen reader users to quickly get disoriented. And it's hard to remember, you know, what column is associated with, you know what letter, especially if there's row and column headers, it's a huge cognitive burden. So now some rules of thumb about a table. So immutable rules. A table must have a single row header, a single column header or both. Now of course, visually it can have multiple headers. We see this very frequently, but when you identify a table, it can only have one row of headers or one column of headers. Excel simply does not have the functionality to do multiple tiered headers. We're going to talk about that more a little bit later. So there are two approaches to identify tables. For both, the semantic information is saved within the file. So this is not a per user JAWS setting. This is something that is we, as authors can do to prepare the spreadsheet for screen reader users. So our first approach is to use Name Manager is to, I'm sorry, is to Create Table. Our second approach is to use Name Manager. So let's start looking at Create Table. So here we have an annual budget and we get a sense of how easily people can be, lose track of where they are within the spreadsheet. You know, they just hear a number announced. It's not clear whether this is for food or gas, and then what month is it associated with? So our first step is to select the table, including its row in column headers. You notice that the selection here should not include the tables title in A1. You know, I mean, if the table has a title, tables don't necessarily have to have a title, but I think it's always a best practice. Step two, so after we select the table to identify it as a table, we can either go to the insert tab in the ribbon and select table, or the easiest approach is to simply press control + T. So when we press control + T it opens this dialogue for creating a table, and you notice here in the screenshot, we want to check the box "My table has headers", this identifies that the table has headers, and mind you, every table should have headers. It is not a table if it does not have headers. So that is critical, just to underscore that again, emphasize that. Okay, so step three, define whether the table has row headers, column headers, or both. So here we see the table design tab. In some versions of Excel, it may be called the design tab in newer versions they call it table design. Again, the exact name depends on the Excel version, but, here we checked header row because we had you know, at first we had a clear row of column headers, right? We had food, gas, utilities, rent, et cetera. And then we also check first column because that was the set of row headers, right? The months of the year, January, February, and so on. So we checked both of them here. Now our next step here is that we provide a name for the table. Again, this is also in the table design tab of the ribbon. So we use a table name, which describes the tables contents, do not use the default table one table two generated by Excel, because it doesn't orient them to the content within that table. Now notice also the table name cannot have spaces. Instead capitalize the start of each word. It's also known as using camel case. So screen readers will correctly pronounce the name. This is kind of analogous to how you should capitalize the words within a hashtag on Twitter or what have you. Okay, so now our last step here is turn on a screen reader and test. Even if you are not a screen reader user, you should be able to test this using a screen reader when a table is identified and its row and column headers are correctly identified, screen readers, such as JAWS 2021 and Windows built in screen reader, if you don't have a JAWS license, Windows built-in screen reader narrator announced each cell's value and its associated row and column headers. This dramatically improves the announcement to screen readers. Because again, it's changing from, you know, C3, let's go back here. The announcement would be changing from, you know, D3 - 560 to D3 - 560 column header Food, month January. And again it really aids them in understanding the spreadsheet. Okay. So if we, you know, and then the next thing here that to see, to test, is that when we navigate into the table, so basically if you're a mouse user or someone that's not familiar with screen readers, you could just click on the spreadsheet and then navigate using the cursor keys into the table. Upon entering the table, screen readers should announce the name that we gave it and the number of rows and columns. So giving screen reader users a sense of how large this table is, it removes that guesswork. So this is really critical. Okay, now we talked about this a few moments ago, I alluded to it about multi-tiered column headers. You know a table may only define a single row of column headers or a single column of row headers, or both. There is no method to associate a cell with multi-tiered headers. So in the screenshot below, we see a workbook from Department Of Labor. This is Paycheck Protection Program subsidies by industry. And when we look at this table, we notice that there are three tiers of column headers. we see in, for example, C C5 and we can see they merged the cells but we'll go over like that for now. But we see in C5, we have the first tier, which is level or changes from the preceding quarter. Then we have a second tier, which is the year 2020 or 2021. And then we have a third tier, which is the actual, the quarter of the year Q3, Q4, and so on. So think about it, if we were to make this a table and basically select the industries as our row headers, and then the Q3, Q4, Q1, all those as our row headers, it would result in an incomplete announcement to screen reader users. Because think about it, they're going to hear some cell announced as you know, Agriculture's 6.4 Q1. But it's unclear you know, what year is Q1, is this referring to, is this the changes from the preceding quarter? Is this levels? It's not a great announcement. Now the solutions of multi-tiered headers, again, there's multiple approaches that are valid. Option one is to break up a complex table into smaller tables. So this table, we could probably make two worksheets. We could make one about this year, and then we could make the next worksheet about changes from the preceding year. Another option is to apply screen reader only, in other words, visually hidden text within each header title to provide an extended and more descriptive title. So for example, you know, if the cell is, the column header is Q2, we could add this, you know, this white text, levels 2021 Q2, so that those are announced when cells in that row are selected and you see how that orients it we're effectively providing an extended description. And this is something of course, developers do a lot on the web, you know, adding visually hidden text to provide more descriptive names about things. Okay, now, again, as I have, I want to emphasize throughout this whole presentation, when you make a spreadsheet that supports disabled people, you make a better spreadsheet. Identifying tables benefits all users. So not only does Excel give you sort and filter functionality when you create it as a table, but for the annual budget table we use in previous sides, let's say we add a column for summing it up, right? I want to know my full expenses for that month. So let's look at the difference and see how table markup really improves the formulas readability. So if we were adding up the individual columns and it's not as identified as table, you see, it's just, it's just the cell, it's just the cell's number, you know, A3, B3, C3. But now when table and row header titles are correctly identified, we see that we get the column header used for each cell and you see how much more readable that is? And if a screen reader user was editing this spreadsheet, they would hear these announced instead, and again, then you have a better ability to verify that the formula has been correctly made. Okay, so now let's move on to the other way of identifying row and column headers. We can use Name Manager. So the Name Manager, you should think of this in Excel, kind of as a list of all of the elements within the workbook. Each individual table or form should be within Name Manager. So Excel has a built in syntax to define names, provide names to a range of cells and define row and column titles within the worksheet, every region, you know, each thing that we're describing each section or table within this workbook must have a unique name. And this is very helpful because some screen reader users pull up the Name Manager and they use it to jump to these individual elements within the worksheet. Now I will say, Create Table is much more straightforward to use in creating a table. And I would recommend most people use that, but Name Manager can be used more flexibly, more broadly, but it is less obvious. So let's go through a quick example here. Okay, so now we're basically doing the same task that we did with Create Table, but we're doing it through Name Manager. So to locate Name Manager, it's just, it's very easy to use the quick search toolbar. You can just type into the quick search toolbar bar, type Name Manager. It comes up as one of the quick search suggestions. So we select that option. Then it brings up a dialog which allows us to select a cell range that we want to provide a name to. So we select a new button to create a new named element, define a new name. So now step three, let's look at a really short example here. We're going to use the naming syntax to define the cell range. We see that we're going to provide a unique name. And we noticed that the syntax is two periods with no space followed by the bottom right coordinates. So look at what we do here, we select in this table, the first cell within the table, the top left cell, and then we use the dot dots to select the bottom right cell of the table. So basically that's how we're selecting the whole tables region. Now look at the syntax here. When we start our name with title region students, we define row and column headers, so in effect, Students, Score, Grade become column headers, the student's name, Sheryl Ng, Thomas Wong, Zack Berry, they become our row headers. And alternatively, we can do row title students, then this just defines row headers. So but that's incorrect you're right. Or we could do column title students, which then defines only column headers. So you know, again, for most tables, it's easier to just create the table. But if you have unusual elements within your worksheet, Name Manager is something you'll definitely use. Okay, so now let's move on from tables to color, addressing a different user group now. Okay, first of all, provide sufficient texts color contrast, ensure that the foreground worksheet text has sufficient color contrast with its background. And you know consider again, you know, that WCAG's principles can be mapped to Excel. WCAG requires a minimum of 4.5 to one color contrast ratio for regular text, which is, you know, texts that is smaller than 18 point font or bold and smaller than 14 point font. And I think it's a great rule to maintain for Excel. Or, you know, requires a three to one color contrast ratio for large text, which is at least 18 point font or bold at least 14 point font. One note about text color contrasts within Excel is Excel provides built in cell styles. Many of them do not have sufficient color contrast. So simply because it is offered with Excel does not mean that is necessarily accessible out of the box. Testing is required there. The next thing to be concerned with in the use of color is do not use color alone to convey meaning. When it screen readers do not announce that a cell has a different background color or foreground text color. So when a table uses color and conditional formatting, we should use this text summary in A1 to state which cells have additional meaning. Alternatively, we could place screen reader only text within the cell to indicate the meaning conveyed by color. Now you think about that, that has to be used in the right situation, because if you have a table that is displaying numbers, if we add visually hidden text within that cell to say, oh, this is a really high value, or this is below median, whatever. It could disrupt our formulas, it'll break them. Because the formula was expecting only number inputs. However, if it's a text-based table, you know, like a list of students, you know, it's not an issue, but again, we have to think about what is interacting with our spreadsheet, how it's being used. Okay. So let's look at an example of a table using color alone. So we see here a table of NPS scores. Okay, so we see that there is a visual legend adjacent to the table that's shows kind of a light red is Detractors, yellow mustard is Passives and this green color is Promoters. So we see in the table that the individual cells are color coded. And again, there's no way for a screen reader user to understand that association. It's not announced as red. They're not able to understand the visual legend either think about it in context, the screen or user is just hearing a blank cell. And then they're just hearing the word detractors, its meaning is really not clear. So let's look at how we can solve this issue. Here, we use text instead to convey which cells have additional meaning, and we provide the same meaning as was given through color. So look here, we see that cell A1 says scores zero through six represent Detractors score seven through eight represent Passives and scores nine through 10 represent Promoters. And see, now it's easy to understand that, it's much easier for screen reader user or someone to understand this workbook. Because we know that if we see a five or we know a seven, we know what group that is affiliated with. All right now on graphs and charts, it's a natural segue from use of color because color of course is very significant in graphs and charts. Okay, so first of all, let's just talk a little bit about like kind of how graphs and charts are contained within Excel workbook. So Excel has a cell layer and a floating layer. So of course the cells is where the actual data is being displayed, held, but when a worksheet has charts, graphs, or images, these objects are in the floating layer. They are not a part of individual cells. So screen reader users may not be aware of the floating content. A screen reader user just navigating through the cells can navigate under floating objects. When they're under the floating object, it is not announced. It's somewhat akin to a website of having a dialogue that's unannounced. That you don't realize that there's content basically visually positioned above where you are within the workload. So now back to kind of, again, about a practical approach to accessibility. Navigating to the floating layer is cumbersome many screen or users may not be able to access that functionality or understand it. Screen reader user is not alerted that there is objects in the floating layer. They basically have to intuit without a text summary, they basically have to guess that information, they have to intuit and just know to check, it's problematic. Okay, so of course, you know, charts and graphs, we want to provide alternative texts to them. So some notes here, you know, don't ever, don't ever provide simply a chart or graphic, always provide the chart or graphic's underlying data in an accessible data table. You know, this makes it available in an equivalent format. Now alternative texts can be applied to floating objects. You can apply alternative text directly to a pie chart or a line chart or whatever. But again, screen reader users have to navigate to that floating layer to hear that alternative text, they may not know to do that, and they may not wish to because it's difficult to navigate within charts. So in addition to providing alternative texts to the actual floating object, provide alternative text in the cell layer. Cell A1 is a logical outlet because again, they have to be able to locate this alternative text. All right, now use of color in charts and graphs. Of course, charts and graphs, you know, they frequently presents some challenges to people that are low vision or have some level of colorblindness. You know, they rely on people perceiving color to distinguish between lines, to distinguish between bars. So some solutions, some ways to make that accessible to this group is provide data labels that are always visually present, so that each bar is labeled. They don't have to refer to the visual legend to understand its category or its field. Another option is to use patterns, you know, dotted lines or striped bars to visually identify different chart elements. This requires sight, but it doesn't require perceiving the color to understand the meaning. All right, now let's talk about the Accessibility Checker and Document Inspector. So Excel has a built-in Accessibility Checker, like all of Microsoft Office products. So the Accessibility Checker and Document Inspector can be accessed numerous ways. This screenshot just shows both tools being accessed from Excel's backstage view and the info tab. The Accessibility Checker can run on demand or continuously while one authors workbooks. So you can have it the entire time you're using the workbook. And the Accessibility Checker is very helpful and it's dramatically improved over the years, but understand its limitations. Automated testing is good at detecting occurrences of simple issues that has significant gaps in testing coverage, manual testing is always required. Let's kind of like dig into as examples of why this is true. Okay, so more on the Accessibility Checker, right? The checker flags default sheet names as an issue, but it does not site non-descriptive or non readable sheet names as errors or warnings. Because again like the automated checker is not able to evaluate the quality or the descriptiveness of the work sheet's name. They simply just state that you have the default sheet name. We know that's improper. Okay. So the Accessibility Checker flags the lack of alternative texts, but it cannot evaluate the quality of alternative texts. So if a workbook author were to just put garbled texts, it would not be flagged by the Accessibility Checker or if they selected some meaningful image and indicated it as decorative, it would not be flagged. Now the Accessibility Checker flags hard to read cell text with low color contrast. But it does not test charts, graphs, images. So if you have, you know, data labels or elements within the chart that lacks sufficient color contrast, it will not be flagged by Accessibility Checker. Accessibility does not test them. And next, the lack of content in cell A1 is not identified as an error or warning, right? It's sort of a best practice, but it's an important thing to have. I really think it's critical, but it's not, Accessibility Checker will not remind you to add this information. Now, tables and row headers not being defined is also not identified as an issue. The Accessibility Checker is not able to determine what really the purpose of your worksheet is, it's unable to. And you know, this is something that we see with accessibility in general, passing automated tests is not the end-all-be-all, all right, the point is an accessible experience. So if we were to use that visually hidden text approach that we were describing earlier, basically using white text within the spreadsheet to provide additional information of screen readers, that would be flagged as an error by Accessibility Checker, right, white text on a white background. But again, we did this consciously, we did this to make the content accessible, so something to consider here. Alright, document settings the Document Inspector. Document properties which we saw as reachable from Excel's backstage view, be sure to provide a title, a subject, an author and a language. Various accessibility guidelines require this. And authors may also add keywords and tags if they so choose. This can be, you know, has unexpected benefits. If someone is using Spotlight search or searching within their computer, you know, these keywords and tags can help find that file. Now Document Inspector is really helpful for preparing a workbook for public distribution. Inspector makes authors aware of any comments, revision data, notes, and can strip them out, can strip out this information that is not intended for end users. Of course I see very frequently online when I download a spreadsheet, I see the person's email. I see the direct absolute path to the file in their Dropbox or the company's cloud, you know, so it's not only confusing 'cause you know, I see it on my own computer and I'm not the author, it's confusing, but it's also a security vulnerability, you're revealing information about your company's internal hardware. So it's something to really avoid and it's very, it's easily fixable. So I encourage everyone when you save and are about to post publish and a spreadsheet, always go to Document Inspector and strip out this information. And besides, you know, sometimes comments, you know, they're not meant for public consumption, you know, so. Okay. There are many things that, Excel is such a huge program, we've just covered, scratch the surface of Excel really, right? We are not going to have time or to cover a VBA or macros or any of these, you know, pivot tables, these sorts of things today, if I get questions we can talk about them, but, and we're covering just kind of the starting use cases here. So in conclusion, does what WCAG apply to workbooks? No, WCAG does not directly apply to Excel. You know, it's document, not web content. However, if your website hosts Excel workbooks, then WCAG arguably applies, you know, ultimately site authors are responsible for all content in their website or application. Now, even if the spreadsheet is not publicly available, internal employees require accessible documents. The inability to work with an internal document represents a serious accessibility issue. You know, when someone is not able to do their job due to an accessible document, that has very real impacts on employment. So this is something to just be concerned with all that we produce within the office, you're not sure who's going to interact with it. Now should you even use Excel? Well, you know, it depends. It depends, right as a lawyer says. HTML is the most accessible, for websites, which are simply allowing users to download a workbook, which just simply displays a table, you know, you often see this with like a simple chart and then it's like, do you want to download an Excel worksheet? Providing a link to another page with a table or a table on that web page is a much more lightweight way of providing that tabular information. And also when we make an Excel workbook or we require a user to download an Excel workbook, we're making an assumption about the programs and tools available to that user. Simply put, not every person has Excel. but every person has web browser, Now Excel does not work as well with assistive technologies when used on Mac. Like any tech company, you know, the products they produce work best with the assistive technologies that they make themselves. And that's something to consider, you know, if your company primarily uses one operating system. Now, Excel has many exciting new features over the past couple of years, you know, one that I think is really awesome is data from picture. Basically Excel allows you now to take an actual picture of a table and then you can upload that table to Excel. So it uses some OCR optical character recognition, and it works very well actually, but it does not produce accessible output by default. So you know, if it is a table, it doesn't identify it as table. It doesn't find row and column headers. We have to do that manually. The next step. Another cool feature here is Analyze Data. This has came out very recently, but basically, Excel has some AI that can form insights about your data. But what I noticed in playing around with this just a little bit is that it really requires that tables are simple and correctly structured. If there are multiple tiered headers, the Analyze Data gets confused. It doesn't understand what the columns represent. So again, it just shows when we make accessible tables, it provides a foundation for using all of these features. You know, we could call it forward compatibility. Now that you've been trained, the issue could be more complex than what we described today. So TPGi offers document remediation and training services. So we provide trainings on Word accessibility, PowerPoint accessibility, Excel accessibility, InDesign accessibility, PDF or advanced PDF accessibility. Just reach out to TPGi. Now in conclusion, last thing I want to do is I want to thank some people for helping me with this presentation. First of all, I want to thank Freedom Scientific. Freedom Scientific has so many wonderful videos online on how to use Excel with JAWS. And they were remarkably, they were very helpful in me creating this presentation and understanding how people use Excel. Of course, Microsoft accessibility, their Twitter handle, MSFTEnable they share very good content. The documentation, they write about accessibility within Excel is great. If you have questions about Excel I'd strongly you know refer to them. And Microsoft, they are, you know, incredible champions for accessibility, heavyweight champions, I really admire them for, and you can see how much effort went into different aspects of Excel. And lastly, I want to thank Zhi Huang from Access Ingenuity. He's an assistive technology instructor and he's a dear friend of my family and someone that really has been a help to me in understanding Excel and assistive technologies in general. And he helped me with this presentation also. So I really want to thank him. Now, it's almost, we have limited amount of time here, but I would like to hear some questions. We'll see, let's look at the Q and A.

- [Mike] Yeah, there's a ton of questions in the Q and A, so I'll let you take it from the top.

- [Aaron] Okay so we're going to go through these as fast as possible. And I want to also mention that if your question was not answered, you're free to reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever and I'm happy to make time to answer your question. It's really not a problem. We don't have to be constrained by the time today. Okay, so can you screen readers access hidden rows? Yes, they can, they can un-hide them, but they may not be aware of that keyboard shortcut. Okay, can screen users can do anything that regular users do. Now, if the row is hidden or whatever, and the screen reader user navigates past this, they are not notified that the row is hidden. It just jumps from, you know, C1 to G1. So they can't access it unless they un-hide them. Can you have two tables on the same page? Well, there's no hard rule that you can't, but I advise against it because think about how that works, is that a person goes through one table and they expect after that table is over, they don't know whether there is more content. Now of course, this can be really remedied by using our tech summary in cell A1. Right, we can state that there are two tables. One table is a phone numbers, one table is of email addresses, the table of email addresses starts on cell A, 54 whatever. Right? So there's no hard rule that we can't have two tables on the same page, but you know, there are trade-offs here, right, it's a very good question because it's like, you could have more tables on fewer pages or you could have fewer tables on more pages. So my advice to you is, you know, get feedback, see what people you work with, people that you're using the spreadsheet think of its structure. Okay, how about naming individual cells? That's good for working with formulas, but it could be more difficult for navigation by row column. I mean, I agree. I mean, I think that's an excellent point. Yeah, I'm not sure where to go on that question, but I agree, you know, and I think ultimately all semantic information we add to the spreadsheet, it's more likely to be helpful then not. Can you have tables on different sheets? Absolutely. Yeah. Also pivot tables automatically puts two rows at tops. Yeah, pivot tables is more complex, yeah. That's why we did not cover it today. If you have questions specifically about pivot tables, please reference me and they're going to be kind of more long-winded my response. How is information in the header and footer read by a screen reader? It's not really, you know, it's similar to the header and footer in a Word document, a screen reader user has to actively decide to move into the header and footer. It's not alerted whether there's any meaningful content in there. So I would avoid, strongly avoid putting content in the header and footer. And besides, you know part of the reason why screen reader users are unlikely to navigate to the headers and footers 'cause it generally has decorative information, a company logo, as we have here right, in these slides. Okay. Will these table settings persist if the user saves the file as a CSV, no, I believe they will not. I will check that, but I don't think they will. When using several tables in one sheet, how do you visually separate the tables without causing issues for screen reader users? Well, as I noted earlier in the presentation, I think you separate each table by a single row. So at the end of the table, you have one blank row, then you start the title or first row of the next table. I think it's totally reasonable for screen reader user where they navigate a few cells down, to see if there's more content. The issue I see sometimes as people for visual appearance reasons, will have like 10, 20 lines in between the tables. Sir, could you please share the screen reader sound? Not right now, sadly, I would love to kick it up, but we're just on limited time, I recommend, if you want to hear how screen reader user interacts with a spreadsheet, go to Freedom Scientific's YouTube and search for Excel. They have many videos demonstrating cool features. And there's so much that can be done within Excel using JAWS. How do you screen reader voice, freezed header row columns as they move through the table? You know I read online some issues regarding freezing header and row columns but when I navigate using a screen reader, I personally haven't experienced the issues. You know, I think the issues regarding the freezing headers and rows, you know, may have more issues for people that are magnifying the page a lot, because if you have a big header, it could consume most of the viewport. Can these slides be shared after the presentation? Yes, love a good, easy question. Let me see, can you. John Decrow, hello, old friend. Are there any concerns with the accessibility of a column that can be reordered? We normally include a button in the header, allowing users to reorder the contents of the table. It's an interesting question, I'm not sure what you mean with a column that can be reordered. I don't know if you mean like using the sorting and filter functionality. That's fine, because again, semantic information is, you know, the association with the column header. So I don't think the organization of rows should effect that, you know. Oh, okay. Can we have the side-by-side view to better see a speaker for web reading, I apologize. I thought that I had it on that view that you could see it. I'm sorry. Do screen readers read the formula or total in the cell? Can screen reader users select which one they view? Yes, they can read the formula. You have to press it in additional commands here, the pull formula. Can you explain how these contrast ratios work practically? I can't, you know, the whole color contrast ratio is such a complex algorithm of how they've determined this and you know, it's such a, you know, it's a point of debate, you know, nowadays.

- [Mike] Arron I think this will be the last question that we answered just because we're over time now.

- [Mike] Yeah, I see that now, so how about using conditional formatting, which uses color for visual navigation, but does not really add new information? Hey, that's fine. It's not adding new information, you know, then it's, it could be considered decorative and, you know, in the web and the web, an image that does not add, you know, information is decorative. That's how we define it. Okay, so I'm sorry, you couldn't get to all of these questions. We've run out of time, but again, you know, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter, my handle's AaronBNB. And I'm happy to answer your questions or email me.

- [Mike] Yeah, thanks again, Aaron, for everything. It was super informative. The chat has been very active and everyone's giving you high praise. I'll share those with you after the session. And if anyone has any other questions or would like accessibility support, as Aaron mentioned, feel free to reach out to us, reply to Ida or reach out to Aaron directly and we can connect you with our team. So thanks again for everyone for joining an awesome webinar. Aaron, appreciate the time.

- [Aaron] Of course, all right, bye everyone.

- [Mike] Bye.

- [Aaron] Have a good one.