Freelance Amy

Hyperlinks for PDF Accessibility: Set Up for Maximum Efficiency

2021-12-08

Hyperlinks are useful navigation tools that provide readers access to additional information about a topic. They can even help users jump from one part of a long PDF document to another.

Note: This post targets folks who have an interest in and/or experience with working on accessibility. If you don’t fall into this audience, I still recommend reading through for some insight on making information accessible to all.

You may already know that meaningful link text makes for an accessible read as I discuss in my post about strategies for accessible documents. If you want to help readers learn more about a topic, you would link to the topic itself and not something like “learn more” or “click here.”

Example of meaningful link text: Go to the CDC website for more information about flu prevention.

In the example above, I have linked to “information about flu prevention” so that readers know exactly what the link is about. If I had linked to “CDC website” or “more information,” readers would be unsure about what, specifically, the link would take them to.

The problem with two-line links

A problem you may not be aware of, however, is the length of hyperlinks. Specifically, I’m talking about link text that breaks across two lines (or more?) of text.

It doesn’t matter much in a Word document, but you should know that these types of links cause problems for PDF accessibility remediation. The problem with links that break to a second line is that PDF readers, notably Adobe Acrobat, like to provide two link tags for the same link.

And why is this a problem? It’s a problem because the screen reader then reads them off as two separate links, thus confusing the user.

In some cases, we can’t avoid this happening. For that there is a fix for double links provided by accessibility guru Dax Castro—skip to minute 5:45 for the detailed tutorial in Acrobat. In this post, though, I’m more concerned with how to avoid double links at all.

What to do with long link text

To avoid having long link text that breaks to a second line, we have a couple solutions.

1. Link to the most specific and relevant information.

That is, focus on the most meaningful text and link to that. Something like “resources page on Acme Brothers’ recall response” could be shortened to “Acme Brothers’ recall response” or even just “recall response” if Acme Brothers is a main topic in the story.

2. Insert a nonbreaking space or hyphen.

Use this strategy when one word appears on a line by itself, or that word breaks at a hyphen. For example, in “solutions to everyday problems,” delete the space after “solutions” and insert a nonbreaking space there.

Or, in “empty-handed college students,” delete the hyphen and insert a nonbreaking hyphen in “empty-handed.”

As you have seen here, writing meaningful text is just the beginning when providing accessible hyperlinks. The next step is to ensure that the links can be remediated efficiently in a digital document.

If you only have one or two links to worry about, Dax’s fix I mentioned earlier is not such a heavy lift. However, if you have multiple links breaking across lines, it’s best to set them up properly in Word first. Then you can just remediate the ones (hopefully, only a handful) that can’t be modified.

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What Are Microsoft Word Paragraph Styles?

2021-11-10

Woman typing while using Microsoft Word styles on her laptop — Image by free stock photos from www.picjumbo.com from Pixabay

The last time I wrote about MS Word, someone told me that Word is a four-letter word in their book. Seems a bit extreme, albeit literal. I particularly like MS Word and its paragraph styles function, but perhaps that’s because I’ve been using it for decades and came to design much later on.

In fact, my fellow designer friends tend to be the most passionate in their utter loathing. That makes sense given how powerful Adobe products like InDesign can be in producing engaging publications.

Necessary Evil

Sure, it can be buggy and Office 365 updates can be supremely annoying. For example, the onslaught of modern comments has resulted in incessant migraines for copy editors round the world, or at least those in my community. And back when Word switched up track changes, it took me a while to figure out how to use simple markup properly.

However, Word paragraph styles have made life so much simpler for those who know about them. I guess that’s the issue, though: most people, who are not designers anyway, don’t know about them!

Most people, in fact, continue to use multiple paragraph breaks and character spaces instead of page or section breaks; paragraph indents; table spacing; and white space around images, headings, and figures.

Sound Familiar?

Does that sound like you? And is your response the following: “Wait, what? That’s not how you’re supposed to do it?”

Man looking at his laptop with a frustrated expression on his face while sitting in a cafe booth. — Image by Tim Gouw from Pixabay

Let me ask you this: Has the notion of a table of contents awakened you in a cold sweat in the middle of the night? Do shifting page breaks frustrate you into reconsidering your life goals? Does image placement make you want to move to a remote mountain village never to be heard from again?

If you’ve answered yes to those questions, you can reconsider that answer just by learning how to apply Word paragraph styles. A clean table of contents doesn’t have to be a mystery and neither do fluid page breaks and images.

Painless Paragraph Styles

The basic concept of paragraph styles is to apply all the fonts AND spacing once so that the changes trickle down to the whole document. THEN, if you decide you want to add more space above or below a paragraph, you just need to make that fix once.

First, create one of your first paragraph styles by formatting any paragraph the way you want it to look. Set your font and font size. Next, go to the Layout tab in the Ribbon, and change the Before and After spacing in the Spacing section.

Create a basic paragraph style in Microsoft Word.

Finally, go back to the Home tab, go to the Styles section, right click over Normal, and select Update Normal to Match Selection. The screencast above doesn’t show the drop-down menu, but it is shown in the image below.

Update the Normal style to make all your paragraphs the same format.

Any paragraph that takes the Normal style now looks like the paragraph you just formatted. If you tweaked the spacing before or after the paragraph, you might see a whole lot of white space between all your paragraphs. That means you probably have extra paragraph breaks. Just click between the paragraph and delete until your cursor lands back at the beginning of the next paragraph.

Just the Beginning of Paragraph Styles

These steps are just the start of what can be done with MS Word paragraph styles, but they are the basic idea if you have been having trouble wrapping your head around a clean, effortless layout.

Once you can grasp this, you can move on to creating heading styles that not only support accessible documents but feed into an automated table of contents as well. You’ll also be able to get page breaks and images to stay where they need to be. That’s all for another day, though.

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Speak Up: The Power of Language

2021-09-29

A woman attempts to speak up using a megaphone — *Speak up!*
Photo by **Andrea Piacquadio** from **Pexels**

I’ve always had a quiet voice. I don’t naturally speak loudly and have to make a conscious effort to speak up.

As a kid making a presentation or asking a question in class, I had to contend with other students in the room being encouraged by the teacher to ask me to “speak up.” However, the teacher did not always instruct my classmates to make the request politely or respectfully.

I wouldn’t have gotten more than two words out when a booming voice of one my peers would interrupt me to demand that I “SPEAK UP!” It was as if they were accusing me of deliberately forcing them to yell at me.

Language is complicated.

A simple juxtaposition like that made up of “speak” and “up” can carry important meaning to the receiver. What other two-word phrases carry such power? Shut up, catch up, get up, keep up. (I’m cherry picking here and deliberately selecting phrases with “up” in them for artistic license.)

The point is that these can come off as rudely demanding phrases even when they are meant to help. “Shut up” is obviously quite rude, but in the appropriate context, the rest of them can be off-putting as well.

On the other hand, I don’t advocate for tiptoeing around the language and living in fear that someone will cancel me if I use a common expression. If I unintentionally upset someone, I should be able to simply apologize — with sincerity, of course—and have that be it.

Language is loud?

As an adult, more things roll off my back and especially as a middle-aged adult. I’m not as bothered by little things anymore, but I still hesitate to make requests that require me to speak up beyond my general level of comfort.

These days I usually find some roundabout way to get someone’s attention. If I can make eye contact, I wait until the other person is within a decent proximity before speaking as loudly while still politely as I can. I usually have to repeat myself.

A man has to speak up when giving an order at a busy lunch counter. — *I like the convenience of lunch counters—no need to flag anyone down.*
Photo by **Elina Sazonova** from **Pexels**

Now that I think about it, I can’t remember the last time anyone actually said “speak up” to me. Have I successfully avoided such a scenario, or are people just more polite? Or is it just kids that are cruel?

Language is communicative.

I recently had a conversation with my neighbor who has no problem speaking up, whether grabbing my attention across the driveway or raising important issues at the monthly HOA meetings.

Speaking of HOA meetings, she has been trying to get me to go to those again. I went once and did not relish the experience of sitting in a hot packed room with a mask on (because pandemic) while trying to pay attention to the echoing voices because the community conference room has terrible acoustics.

An analog clock on a concrete wall — *Tick tock, tick tock.*
Photo by **Shawn Stutzman** from **Pexels**

It’s not hard to speak up there, but it’s hard to comprehend or feign interest in a three-hour meeting about proper tree irrigation and door colors. Yeah, you read that right … three hours!

Anyway, I’d been avoiding talking to her about these meetings, but that day I gathered my courage and managed to speak up about how I didn’t particularly care for the meetings and didn’t see much point. We exchanged arguments politely and went on our merry ways.

Not once did she ask me to speak up. I am thinking about giving the meetings one more chance, though.

Language is powerful!

Speaking up can also be hard when you’re not used to the sound of your own voice. I read recently that our voices sound much richer to ourselves and so that’s why we’re so disappointed when we hear our voices on recordings. It’s just never as good as we think it is.

I have published a couple online courses and am working on a third to hopefully launch in November. It was hard for me to edit the audio of these courses at first. The sound of my own voice was grating. I thought I sounded like a little kid, and it brought back some of those anxious memories.

However, after launching the second course, a freelancing colleague commented that I had a pleasant and clear voice that was easy to listen to. I then played one of the lessons back and heard myself in a new light, er, soundwave.

I guess the power of language can only be acknowledged when one appropriately speaks up.