Grackle Demo

Transcript

[THALIA KAPICA]
Hi everyone, I’m Thalia Kapica, Senior Web Accessibility Specialist in the CDA. I’d like to welcome you to our demo for Grackle for Google Workspace. We’ll post a link to the PowerPoint presentation in the chat, for your reference if you want to follow along.

This session will be recorded in case anyone wasn’t able to attend or if you want to be able to watch it again later. Any Q&A will be removed from the recording before we share it, so, do please feel free to ask any questions. And we will have time for Q&A at the end of the session. So, with me are Jack Auses and Emily Baker, also from the CDA.

And to get started, I will turn this over to Emily.

[EMILY BAKER]
Hi, everybody. Glad that you could join us today. I’m gonna just start sharing my screen.

Okay. Is everybody seeing the slide? Good to go? So, today we’re here to talk about a new tool that we recently rolled out for the campus, Grackle for Google Workspace.

Interesting name, but some very important functionality. Grackle is a licensed add-on to the UChicago Google Workspace. Incidentally, that does not currently include the Google Workspace instances for Booth or Lab School.

So, essentially, anybody who has access to the central UChicago Google Workspace also has access to these new Grackle tools. And they are used basically to help you create more accessible Docs, Sheets, and Slides. The Grackle tools will fill some gaps within the accessibility of those file formats themselves, but it also, especially important, produces more accessible output when you export to another format.

Because we know that a lot of Google documents end up becoming other files, especially PDFs, and the Grackle tools actually help you create accessible tagged PDFs in some of the instances. What Grackle does, without being difficult to use and without requiring a lot of accessibility expertise, is that it will run an automated accessibility check on your documents. It will break down accessibility issues into prioritized, manageable tasks. We’re going to show you that functionality for each of the three main Google applications, so that you can see how simple and easy it is to follow along.

And it also will flag issues that you need to check manually. Obviously, automated tools can pick up a certain percentage of accessibility functions, features, and errors, but many things do require your human judgment to check. As with any sort of accessibility work in a document, We strongly advise you to keep our own content creation guidelines in mind.

We do have a web page with our top tips. We’re not going to dive into them too deeply here, but I just wanted to reiterate the considerations to have in mind when you’re creating most types of content. You know, thinking about meaningful document titles, this is an area where Grackle is especially helpful because Google does not actually place your document title in document metadata all by itself. Structuring your content, organizing it into meaningful chunks, and giving it semantic headings to distinguish the content pieces.

Utilizing meaningful link text so that when people click on your links, they know where they’re going to go. Formatting lists properly as actual lists, not just things that look like lists. Alt text for your images, considering the readability of your document, defining the language so that assistive technology can know what language that it will be using to read your content out loud. And then some of these features that require the human check or a separate check, the appropriate use of color and sufficient contrast.

That is a check that a Grapple can’t do for you internally, but it will remind you to check for it as you go. Data tables with proper structure.

This is another area where Google is particularly unhelpful. You can create a layout table.

You can format it to look very much like a table, but Google functionality does not allow you to actually designate header rows or columns. And that will create a failure for an accessibility check and make it more difficult for users to navigate table-based content. And then if you are embedding any multimedia, obviously, keeping captions in mind.

So, the basics of the accessibility features that you’ll want to have in mind when you’re creating any content. Google also provides some guidance as well. Essentially, they are all the same sort of top accessibility content tips that we advise you to think about. Particularly, because of the collaborative nature of the Google Suite.

When people are working together on documents, for accessibility, Google recommends that you use commenting and suggesting functionality instead of inline notes for better usability. So, instead of just adding a comment inline to a document or a slide, go ahead and make a comment or a suggestion because that can be navigated and read out by assistive technology. Using Google’s advice does help you to create more accessible content within the Google applications themselves and a well-crafted document in one of the Google applications is generally fairly usable.

But again, one of the weaknesses in the Google Suite itself is that it does not produce accessible content on export. So, that’s one of the reasons why it’s very helpful for us to have the Grackle Suite to correct those problems for us. Luckily, it’s very easy to use the Grackle Suite in any of the main apps. You can launch it from the Extensions Menu.

The first time that you run it in each of the applications, you’ll need to authorize Grackle’s use. And then also, the first time you export a document from any of the three applications, you’ll need to authorize it to have access to your Google Drive. But other than that, there’s no special action that you need to take in order to access the tools. And then we’ll move on to our demo phase.

I’m going to stop sharing this. Let’s see if I can quickly switch it. I will switch out my screen share.

Just a moment. So, what I’ve done today, is I have created a little, not very well crafted, slideshow.

So, I just want to share a few of the features of Grackle within the Google Slides. So, we have a typical, basic, slideshow, using Google Slides. Specifically in the Slide application, the recommendation for better accessibility is to use the pre-built layouts and themes, this is very similar to our guidance for PowerPoint. Because if you create your own layout, the reading order of the elements will be determined by the order that you add each item to the slide.

And it will not follow the visual layout necessarily. So, you have to be sure to add each of your elements to the slide in the correct order that you are hoping people will want to read. Like, a lot of visual building tools, Google Slides will read the elements that you add to the slide from back to front or from the bottom layer to the top layer.

It can be a little bit confusing to remember that. But pre-built layouts generally provide a logical reading order. It’s pretty simple to double check it, and you can change it if you need to. So, when you build a slide, you can check the reading order by clicking into the background of your slide and just tabbing through it.

So, this is a super basic slide format, but you can see that the first thing that I tab to is what I would consider the Slide Title. The second is the basic content element, and that is the reading order that I expect for this particular slide. We’re going to move on to the next slide.

Here, I’ve drafted another similar kind of basic slide. I’m clicking into the background. I’m gonna tab through the elements.

And you can see that it starts with the graphic, goes to my numbered list, and then ends up with the Slide Title. So, this is clearly not the reading order that I would intend for that. So, you can see it can look very nice on the screen, but it doesn’t necessarily result in a logical reading order.

And this is another item that you’ll have to do no matter what tools you’re using, Trust but verify. So, I’ve built another sort of slide with one of the Google’s pre-built layouts, and I’m gonna show you the reading order that I get here. It starts with the title, ‘Trust but verify,’ bounces over to my main content, but it ends up at what I would think of as the subtitle.

So, I don’t think this is a logical reading order. And so, it will need to be fixed.

The way to fix that is under the arrange menu. Oops, I have to have an item in selection, it’s a little bit tedious. There’s no real way to do it for the whole slide at once, but you can pick an element and then you can tell it whether you want to send it all the way to the front, which means it’s the last thing that you add to the slide, so, it will be last in the reading order.

So, very confusing. And then you’ll have to test each one, test each item to see whether it ends up where you wanted it. So, let’s send this.

I’ll probably forget which way I want to send it. We’re going to send it one back. Nope, I sent it all the way to the back.

So, you can manipulate your reading order. Just remember one element at a time and test it after the fact. The other thing that Grackle does not test for, at least in Slides context, is contrast.

So, here I’ve chosen a pre-built Google slide theme. But as you can see from this screenshot, I’m using the Colour Contrast Analyser tool to compare the white text against the sort of teal blue background and it fails for every checkpoint it does. So, using the pre-built themes is not necessarily a guarantee that you’ll have an accessible result for every potential checkpoint. So, always check the color contrast for your Slides.

The other thing that Google cannot do is that it cannot make an accessible table. I mentioned this earlier.

So, you can build a little table, it can look perfectly nice. You can style it in a way that makes sense visually, but it will not on its own create a title or an accessible table. There’s no way in the table configuration or the table builder to designate your header rows, either within the slide or either within Google or to be tagged properly for export.

So, let’s, that is a function to keep in mind. And then finally, we’ll demo exporting to accessible PDF in just a moment. So, I have my crummy slideshow and we’re going to go ahead and launch Grackle from the Extension Menu I’ve launched it before, so, it’s not asking me to authorize it. But again, only on the first run.

It’ll pop open a panel on the right-hand side of your slideshow. It’ll run its little check on the side, and it will give you a list of all of the things that it’s checking for, whether or not it passed each checkpoint. And then when you click into each element, it’ll help you fix it.

So, it wants you to create a slide title for every slide. And it will bounce you into each of these again, because I created, handcrafted these, Google doesn’t recognize or Grackle doesn’t recognize because Google didn’t designate the Slide Titles. Again, another reason to use the pre-built layouts.

One of the nice things here is the tagging tables. Grackle will detect your table and it will tell you that it needs to be tagged. It’ll allow you to designate it as a layout table. I’m going to check mark the first row as a header row because that’s really, it’s a simple table construction and that’s all we really need to do.

And we’re going to go ahead and update. Another common error that Grackle is going to find and help you fix is the lack of alternative text for your images. Again, if you click on the item that it finds, it’ll allow you to add alternative text or to mark your text as an artifact. Just going to quickly fix one of these.

These are really sort of alerts. Not necessarily needing to fix, but you can using this. So, we have an empty paragraph at the end of my list, so, I can fix those on every slide it finds it in.

And I’m just going to quickly rerun this check. Actually, I’m going to demonstrate one caution. Grackle has checked this for document language and it claims that I’m passing it.

However, this is where you are going to want to use your own judgment. The language is currently set to French Canadian, for fun. So, the automated tool can detect that the language has been set for this document, but it cannot tell whether or not it’s the correct language. But I can go in and fix it here.

we go straight to English. You can set it as the default so that all of your subsequent documents sort of are automatically tagged as being in the language that you designate.

Once you’ve fixed some of the errors, you can run a Re-check. So, now I’m passing 15 out of 16 because I didn’t fix my slide titles. And then the next step would be to export to PDF.

Google Slides will let you download your file into various formats, including a PDF document. If you do that here, you will end up with a completely untagged and inaccessible file.

But if you use the Export to PDF button in Grackle, very simple process. Click the button, hit Start. You’ll watch it progress.

And once your document is ready, you can take a quick look at it or you can download it or both. But you can see what your PDF file will look like visually. And you can go ahead and download it here.

I don’t want to eat up too much of everybody else’s time, but I will assure you that if you have run the accessibility checker with Grackle, and if you have followed all the advice and checked 15 or if you get all 16 of your checkpoints passed, the exported PDF will be an accessible tagged document. And I will turn it over to our next presenter.

[JACK AUSES]
Thank you, Emily. So, I am going to do the Google Docs. So, let me share my screen. So, like Emily, I’ve created kind of a crummy Google Doc here. Mostly looks fine, but I’m not using headings properly.

There’s color contrast defects here, some other issues. So, similar to Google Slides, following the best practices for content creators will get you pretty far with Google Docs. One thing that’s nice about Google Docs specifically is it makes it really easy to properly format your text.

Kind of creating this sort of error-laden document was a little bit difficult, honestly, Google Docs wants to sort of prevent you from doing things like that. So, if you use the formatting tools, the native formatting tools properly, you should be in pretty good shape. I’m going to, just like Emily did, I’m going to run the Grackle Docs extension.

One thing I’ll mention is the Grackle extension, you kind of, there’s a separate one for each of the products, so, Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets. And you do have to authorize it the first time you use it in each different product. So, if you’ve authorized it for Google Docs menu, and then you want to run it on a slideshow or a Google Sheet, you’ll have to authorize it, that first time you launch it in those other tools. All right.

So, here is my report. So, I’ll just kind of go down and talk about the stuff that is flagged.

Document title is required. I don’t have this title but, that’s interesting. I don’t know why I’m getting a license issue.

So, images should have alternative text that would be marked as an artifact. So, I have one image embedded in this document and it does not have alt text associated with it.

I can select this, I can also, click that, another tag, since this has visible text in the image, the alt text should match the visible text. There is some heading structure issues here. So, headings should be used. And I’ll try to refresh this to see if something’s going on with this license business.

As you can see, when I reran it, that image check now passes because we added alt text. There we go, okay.

So, that’s something else we timed out. Heading should be used. So, there are paragraphs in this document that look like an H1.

See, it tells me the Grackle for Google Workspace heading is the culprit here. Change that to an H1, update it. That will, on export, it will export this, when it’s exported to PDF, this will then be tagged as an H1. The other sort of more native fix would be to change it to an H1.

in the formatting tools in Google Docs. That has the same effect. And then your Google Doc is also then, using proper headings.

I have a couple headings in here that are paragraphs that are also not formatted as a proper heading. So, we have an H2 as Features, but down here Support is listed as normal text. And it seemed to think this is a heading, even though it’s inside of the table, which is interesting.

Just like that you can set in all text We also have a table in here that is just being used for layout. So, generally avoid that in a Google Doc. Table support in general is not great in Google Docs, especially, for data tables.

That’s a limitation of Google Docs specifically, but we can tag this content as a paragraph so that when it’s exported, that table will be considered just layout and it’ll not be treated like a table in the export. It’s also going to give me some warnings. There’s some merged cells in this table, and the use of merged cells is not recommended. So, let’s look at that.

And you can decide if you want to unmerge those cells. Same thing with empty table cells. If you have empty table cells, looks like it’s locate.

It looks like I just have a row here that is empty, so I can delete that. I’m not using any landmarks in this document, there are no headers or footers.

So, again, that’s the best practice that Grackle is going to tell you about. And then down under content, there’s a few more checks. Again, some best practice stuff and including contrast checker. So, it does work in Google Doc version.

It’s going to flag, change these things, but the features and support were initially dark and a light gray, on white. And so, it’s telling me that’s 2.85 is the contrast ratio.

It should be 4.5. Since I’ve changed the format on those, they’ve updated. So, I rerun this check.

That issue should fall off. It is going to flag text that’s too small. So, I have a line down here at the bottom of the document that is set at 8 point font, which is very difficult to read.

I believe the minimum that Grackle wants you to set text to is, I believe it’s 10 pixels, pop that up. And just avoid all caps in general. So, it’s going to flag those as well.

Change Features. Change Support.

And it does it does check your link text, if you have link text in there, for vague link test. So, things like “Click here” or “Read more”. So, I have one “Click here” link in the document, there it is.

And so, I can change that to something more meaningful. I’m going to run a Re-check. We still have some issues with the table. So, I think I might be able to fix those.

Let’s see, where’s this empty? I still have one empty cell. This is a good example of why using tables for layout is a bad idea anyway. Check and then we can tag the table, I believe, on export.

There, this is the first time I’m doing an export with this. So, as you can see, I have to grant it access. You find that I still have some issues here,.

so, I can move back. Emily, are you sort of familiar with why this is complaining to me, even though I’ve updated or added the tag?

[EMILY BAKER]
Sadly, no. It does seem to be thinking, when you were configuring the table before, it seemed to be including the Features heading text. So, it might be attributing more content to the table than isn’t —

[JACK AUSES]
What’s there? That’s interesting. Again, another example of maybe just don’t use tables for layout.

[EMILY BAKER]
A cautionary tale.

[JACK AUSES]
Yeah. It doesn’t like that at all. So, let me I’m just going to delete this table. And there we go.

So, whoever likes to work with that as a PDF, it should be pretty good shape. All of my checks have passed. There are some best practice stuff that I could address, but all of the critical accessibility potential issues have been addressed and 22 of 22 checks passed. So, that’s an example of using it on a Google Doc.

I guess my one big takeaway would be stay away from tables. Table support in Google Docs in general is not great, so, even using data tables might be a little bit fraught. But especially for layout, it’s just not a good idea.

So, sticking to simpler layouts is going to be a much more accessible way of generating documents. I’m going to stop my screen share, and hand it over to Thalia.

[THALIA KAPICA]
Alright, I’m going to close this out by demoing Grackle in Sheets, which I will start sharing here. So, I have also created a crummy sheet. I’m going to launch the Grackle plugin, and it’s going to start its check. It takes a little moment while it goes through all these checks.

So, first thing it’s found is that sheet document needs a proper title. So, I’ve just called it, ‘Untitled Spreadsheet,’ which is not very helpful. This is an export of one of our accessibility automated checker’s findings. So, I’m just gonna call it, give it a meaningful title.

Similarly, a sheet name should be descriptive. It’s found that I’ve got five Sheets here and I just left them at the default, sheet 1, sheet 2, et cetera. I’m going to rename sheet one.

Just call it, accessibility export. I’m not gonna rename the others because Sheets should also not be empty. It’s found that I have just four empty Sheets here that we don’t need, so, I am going to delete them.

And then we have, tables should have headers. This seems to be some sort of metadata in sheets that I was unable to surface using just Google’s default tools. But Grackle will allow you to just hit this mark button. And this is gonna automatically relaunch the checker.

But it’s going to insert some kind of data that will mark this header row, as the header for the table. I guess it didn’t fully rerun it. We’ll rerun it in a little bit.

So, it’s also found that the use of merged cells is not recommended. Also, I apologize, the contrast right now, makes it a little difficult to see. I’ll get to that in just a moment. But the use of merged cells is not recommended.

So, we’ve got a couple here. It’s going to be a little hard to show with the contrast. If I click on this, it’s outlining these two, F2 and G2, and then F3 and G3. And I can just tell it to unmerge it for me, which it will take care of.

It’s also found this isolated cell. If I click on it, it’s going to take me to… I just have this random box here and it has nothing to do with the data in my table. It doesn’t belong there, so, I’m just going to delete that. Like Jack demoed in the Docs, fine print should be avoided.

Cell A3 over here is really tiny, so, I’m just going to bump that back up to 10 to match everything else. And then this also has a built-in color contrast checker.

Remarkably, the blue and black does technically pass AA guidelines. I think it’s pretty hard to see, but it technically passes. What Grackle is complaining about here is the blue links on the blue background, and it flags every single instance. And you can click on them and it will take you to anywhere that it has that issue.

I have found that there’s a little bit of a bug in this so, what I’m going to do first is, I’m going to choose the default alternating colors in Google Sheets. The Google default styles all have accessible contrast ratios so, I would just recommend sticking to those anyway instead of picking something that’s really hard to read.

So, I’m gonna hit done. The bug that I found is that if you rerun it now, it’s going to continue to flag these as failing contrast but if I select and I clear formatting which doesn’t really change anything because it’s just using default link styles, that should fix it.

So, now I’m gonna hit, Re-check. And it looks like now we’ve passed every check. So, this should be an accessible table.

Sorry, unlike Slides and Docs, it doesn’t give you a download PDF, it downloads just a straight HTML file. Which seems to be pretty accessible, so, that just downloaded it to my computer. So, that’s Grackle for Sheets.