6.2 Check for accessibility and compatibility - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v Instructor>Before sharing your spreadsheet</v> run the accessibility checker to make sure your content is easy for people of all abilities to read and edit. The accessibility checker helps ensure your workbook meets accessibility criteria. It will do the following. It will find most accessibility issues but a manual check of the workbook is also recommended. It will explain why each issue found might be a potential problem for someone with a disability. It will classify issues into errors and warnings which we will discuss, momentarily. And finally, it will offer suggestions on how to resolve each issue. Errors in the accessibility checker are things such as any non-text content that does not have alternate text, tables that do not specify column header information, cells in an Excel worksheet that do not use red-only, the color red, that is, formatting for negative numbers, and documents that have restricted access. Warnings in the accessibility checker are things such as a table that has a simple structure, sheet tabs that do not have meaningful names, and any text and background that do not have sufficient contrast between them. Next, we will discuss the compatibility checker. In this case, maybe your organization has upgraded to a new version of Excel, or in the process of upgrading and you realize you'll be sharing your workbook with people who've not gone through the upgrade process, yet. The compatibility checker can help you identify features or information that may not be available in an earlier version of Excel, so you can then resolve potential issues before you share your workbook. Issues that cause a significant loss of functionality will cause a permanent loss of data or incorrect functionality. Issues that cause a minor loss of fidelity will not lose data or functionality, but the workbook might not look or work the same way when you open it in an earlier version of Excel. So let's go ahead now, and take a look at some of the accessibility issues we may have. So I'm going to show you a couple different ways to get at the accessibility checker. First what we'll do is we'll go into the Backstage view so we'll go File, we'll go Info, Check for issues, click the drop down box, and we can say Check accessibility. So let's start it this way. We can see on the right-hand side of the screen the accessibility checker pane has identified some errors and some warnings. Let's take a look at the errors, first. What we can do here is we're going to click on the little expander view right here, and we can see that there's missing alternate text. So if we go ahead and click on that what's going to happen is that we will notice that this image over here, does not have any alternate text. So if the screen reader were to go ahead and read this, it would not have any idea how to identify or describe that particular item. And we can see down, below, it gives additional information on why you should fix this and what the steps are to go about addressing that. So what we can do here, in this particular case, is we can right-click on Object, and down at the bottom, it says Edit alternate text, we can go like that, and what we can do here, is just put a description, here. So let's just say Adventure Works logo, something nice and simple. Something like that. So when I go ahead and Enter here now, we can see that the error has gone away from that particular item that did not have the alternate text. I can click on the next error here, and see there's an exclusive use of color, so I can click on this right here, and it's letting me know that for these piece information here, that have negative numbers, and they only show up in red as opposed to having the negative sign, as well, it's giving me some issues with those. To go ahead and correct this error, I am just going to go up to the top here, and instead of choosing Currency, I'm going to go down here, and choose Accounting. So we can see here, that in this particular column, we have some issues of the exclusive use of color, as we mentioned. So what I'm gonna do here, is I'm gonna go through this entire column right here, over in that actual spreadsheet itself, and I'm gonna go ahead and reformat this. So I'm go from Currency and change this over to Accounting. So now we can see that yes, we were using red number to indicate a negative, but we'll also have a negative sign over here, to help somebody who may be colorblind. And now that we've done that, the error has gone away. So let's take a look at some of these other issues. We're not going to go ahead an fix these. So some of the warnings which we just are warned about here is the merge cells, right here. We have the sales title as being merged. It's letting you know that here's the issue and here's how to go ahead and fix it, and all the different steps. And we can go down here and take a look at this next warning that says there's hard to read text contrast. So let's go ahead and find those ones, right here. So we can see that we've got some data that is still hard to read. So we got this red, here. So it's identifying the red as something that's gonna be difficult for somebody who is colorblind to potentially see. And if I click on this next one, down here, where I have these columns that say sales representative but they're a very faint blue, the contrast just isn't there to support accessibility. And once again, it'll let us know why we should fix this and the steps that we should go about to go ahead and fix these. And finally, one nice feature that you can do inside of Excel here, is we can click this little box, right here, that says Keep the accessibility checker running while you work. What that'll do is in the bottom, left-hand side of the screen, the accessibility checker will continuously run and as you build your workbooks up, it will let you know when you run into issues that are causing accessibility challenges so you can address them immediately. Okay, so now let's take a look at the compatibility checker. So what we're gonna do here is I'm going to turn off my alternate text pane. I am going to turn off the accessibility pane over here, as well. And I'm gonna go to by Backstage view, so I'm gonna go File, Info, and go to Check for issues, and Check for compatibility. So what this is going to do here, I'm just gonna make this a little bit bigger, is that is showing me the things that if I move down to a different version of Excel will cause a significant loss of functionality and the things that will cause a minor loss of fidelity. One of the things I can do here, too, is I can choose the versions of Excel that I want to make a compatibility checking with. So maybe I want to go ahead and turn off my Excel 97 and 2003. So I do that, we're gonna see that most of the issues go away, except for this one, significant loss of functionality, here. So let's go ahead and investigate that one. So this issue is letting us know that one or more cells in this workbook contain a threaded comment and that these comments will be removed. So let's go ahead and see where those are. So I'm just going to click OK, and what I'm going to do is go find those comments. So what I can see here, when I come back to my document is if I click in this cell right here, I've got a threaded comment in my document here, that I would need to go ahead and remove, if I wanted to save it in a previous version. So what I can do is I can click these ellipses right here, and I can actually say Resolve the thread, or Delete the thread. Let's just go ahead and delete this. And now, I'm gonna go back over to my compatibility checker. Let's go to the Backstage view. Check for issues, go to Check compatibility, and I'm gonna knock Excel 97 and 2003 out if the mix, here. And now, we can see that our workbook is free of any compatibility checker issues. So once again, we run the compatibility checker just to make sure that if we were planning on sharing this workbook with somebody who had a lower version of Excel than needed, that we could figure out where those issues actually reside. With that, we are now at the end of this sub-lesson.