Amazing Word

Due to a slight misfortune with a broken leg (doh) I'm taking part in the online delivered course retrospectively so will blog comments as I watch each pre-recorded module. This one is for the Amazing Word recording on 18th March.

Activity 1: I've downloaded the aptly named activity1.doc and using www.freepdfconvert.com have converted it to PDF. I know when I've convered to PDF from Word on a PC I had to install a converter, but on my Mac I can just save as a PDF so this is a useful tool. I've tagged it on my delicious account, all bookmarks saved for this course will be tagged with itq.

When the tagged / formatted Word document is converted to PDF, the text marked as Heading 1 and 2 become bookmarks in the PDF document.

Activity 2: I compared the Word doc at 500% in Print and Web layout view. In Print the user has to scroll across the page to read the text, in Web layout the text is automatically wrapped. This makes it easier to read as the user doesn't lose their place on the page.

With the PDF when I zoomed into 500% on normal view, I had to scroll across. However, when I changed to View>Zoom>Reflow it wrapped the text, but removed the spaces between words so was difficult to understood. However, when I went through the same procedure with the Becta PDF, it wasn't an issue.

I've previously attended training on making Word documents accessible, but hadn't come across the reflow issue with PDFs so I'm hoping we'll learn how to ensure this doesn't happen! I will have to explore with the PDF converter on my version of Word.

Students with visual impairment may need to zoom text to 500% so ensuring documents are correctly formatted so reflow for Word & PDF worked correctly would make a difference to their comprehension of the text.

Activity 3: I have to look at the Word doc in Document map view and Outline view. Er, I don't have map view on my Word (I'm on a mac), but a quick google shows I need to go View > Navigation pane and then I get small thumbnails that I can click on to navigate through the document. Ah, one final stage, there's a drop-down where I have to choose 'document map' and now I can see all the hierarchy, similar to a website's site map. Using the document map all the style guides that are used (heading 1, 2, 3 & 4) are turned into hierarchical elements which makes it easy to navigate through the document. Levels are also expandable and collapsible. Using Outline view I could grab different sections and move them around, I guess useful but I didn't feel I had too much control when reordering text in this way.

Having a large document in map view could make it more appealing to students who might otherwise be overwhelmed by a large amount of text, as they could navigate through chunks of text at a time.

Using View > Automatically scroll in PDF was kind of fun, though it makes me think of another use as an autocue for when filming (useful for when making videos!). I found the scrolling text was a bit jumpy on my eyes, though I have slightly scotopic sensitivity so this could be the reason why.

It was interesting to play with mindmeister, I've seen mind mapping tools before and knew they exported to document maps, but hadn't seen this particular tool. Shame it isn't free!

As I'm listening to this recording I'm starting to think of actions, so I've created an ITQ to do list in Ta-da.

In the presentation there was an image presented in colour and one presented in black and white, to show how difficult it could be for people with colour coding difficulties or a loss in eyesight. Interesting, I'd never thought about that - one should select images with high colour contrast.

Di talked about optimising images for the web or documents and ensuring it doesn't loose too much detail. When doing this I've always found it a balance between ensuring the image is readable and file size.

I'm interested in learning about how to make tables more accessible, when I've done this in the past I've taken the content out of a table. Ah, I see you have to consider how to present the data and can change the orientation. However, Alistair makes the good point that non-data shouldn't be in tables! When I create lesson plans for myself I use a table, as personally it makes it easier to read. When I publish these online, I change the layout so that it's not in table format and therefore more accessible.

The session was really useful, my main learning outcomes were about different document views, magnification and reflow. I've created an action list for this module, so lots to get on with!