Unlock Excel’s Power for Everyone

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hello everyone again, it’s Chris King from Able Spectrum. Today we’re going to dive into a topic that doesn’t get a lot of attention accessible Excel files. I’m sure there’s a lot of you out there that use Excel quite a bit and you probably have a way of using it that’s comfortable for you. I know this because I’ve met a few of you in person. Well, it’s time to level up those skills and make sure your Excel files work for everyone. So let’s go. So I’ve broken this video into five sections. Each section reflects an important aspect of Excel and something worth paying attention to. There’s nothing too difficult to wrap your head around, but it will help your users quite a bit. So here’s how I’ve broken it down. Section one is structure and semantics, not as hard as it sounds, just giving meaning to all the different parts of your Excel sheet. Two alt text, I’m sure you’ve heard of this before in Word and in many other different places. It acts a little bit differently in Excel. Three charts, graphs and other objects, four tables and five. The ubiquitous accessibility checker.

(01:42):
You’re going to want to give all of your sheets names rather than sheet one, sheet two, sheet three. You can say what that sheet is about. And then from the index page you can link to those sheets. So you highlight the text as you would any link such as in Microsoft Word, you right click or control click and you select insert link from within the Excel dialogue box. It’ll allow you to link to a particular sheet in the file instead of your usual web hyperlink. Next one is flow. You want your Excel sheets to flow as you would in any document we read from left to right, top to bottom. So that’s basically what flow means. The first cell at the top left of your sheet is cell A one. There. You’re kind of taking advantage of that to describe what your sheet is about. So you have the sheet name itself in the tab at the bottom. Then in cell A one, you want to describe a little bit about what that sheet’s about, which brings us to the next one, which is remove all blank sheets and blank rows and blank data cells. So anything that’s blank, just remove it.

(03:01):
Alt text, as you know or may not know, has to do with descriptions of images. So alt is short for alternative. So you can pretty much put alt text anywhere these days. Even Facebook now has an option to describe any images you upload, but it’s definitely available on the web in HTML. Also Word and Excel and most other Microsoft apps have an option to add alt text. The reason I’m describing it in Excel is because while there’s a little bit of a debate, but it might work a little bit differently, not all assistive technology works the same. So if you put alt text in the alt pane in Excel, it may not be read by some assistive technology. So some people recommend to actually put the alt text in the cell itself. So if you have a chart or an image, put the alt text directly in the cell adjacent to it, whether it’s an image, a table, a chart, or a graph just to give a little description about what it is and what’s coming next.

(04:15):
The next main topic I want to discuss are graphs, charts, objects, and other type things. Charts are a great way to communicate information visually in an Excel sheet, but let’s face it, not everyone has 2020 vision and some people have no vision at all. So what can we do to help? Well, the first thing you can do is label all the elements in your chart. For example, the axis, the legend, the data labels, everything should have a label just like you’re adding names to your tabs and descriptions for your sheets. Add information to as much information as you can to your charts. And if your charts use colour, for example, it’s a bar graph and you have a red, green and blue bar, make sure to add some sort of pattern to those bars so that they’re distinguishable to people who maybe colorblind. So you could test that in black and white for example, and see that you can tell the difference between the different bars.

(05:20):
As mentioned prior, have an alt text for graphs and charts as well. Most people associate alt text just with the images, but you can actually give alt text to pretty much everything. And in this case, it’s just a little description of what that thing is. It just allows people basically to skip it. If they perhaps already know or they’re not interested in that information, your tables need to be accessible too. So to do that, when you select your table in Excel, you’ll find a little input box in the menu at the top that allows you to give that table a name. Following that naming convention we previously spoke about, always give your table a name. It doesn’t allow spaces and certain characters, so use Camel case if need be. When creating a table, always use table headers. Tables are not to be used for layout to position certain things where you want them.

(06:22):
There’s other features that allow for that, but ensure your tables have a header. This will just indicate to assistive technology that your table is a data table without selecting that checkbox that says first column header or row header. Assistive technology won’t know what type of table it is. You can also put a little bit of information in the cell that lets users know how many cells there are in your table for how long it goes horizontally or vertically. Sometimes a user may not know once they’ve reached the last cell, so that’s helpful. Finally, don’t split or merge cells in tables. That’s a big one for assistive technology. System. Technology basically is able to tell the user what cell they’re in by telling them the header row and the header column along with the data in that cell that way. But you’re giving all the information the user needs to give context to the data in this cell. By splitting or emerging cells system technology hasn’t yet figured out how to announce where that cell exists. If you have to create more complex tables like that, consider using two tables instead of one or three or four or however many you need to break it down. More simply.

(07:59):
Last but not least, or first but not least, is the accessibility checker a tremendous addition to Microsoft 365 applications. Actually it was there in Microsoft 2016 and possibly prior, but it is become more sophisticated and more capable over time and it’s one thing that you really need to do to make your documents and your Excel sheets accessible. Fortunately, the accessibility checkers available also in Word and PowerPoint and possibly some other apps. It’s good to start it. Use it at the start of your document creation and also at the end you can actually just leave it running. So it’ll indicate when you have an accessibility issue or error as you are creating your document. It is under the review menu and there’s a button closer to the left of the menu that says accessibility checker. And you can hold the dropdown button and you can specify the specific kind of accessibility check that you want, and then a pain will pop up or open up rather on the right side of the window and display all the warnings and errors.

(09:23):
So it’s good to do that definitely at the end, but it do know that it’s won’t catch everything. You still need to do the manual check, for example, using your eyes if you can see for contrast and any other sort of manual check. But it does catch a good number of accessibility issues. So thank you for watching this video. If you found it helpful, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe for more tips on accessibility, let’s make our world more inclusive. You’re definitely making your Excel files a lot more accessible, so stay tuned for more videos on this topic and look forward to seeing you again soon. Bye for now.