I want you to travel back in time with me for
a second to a very specific kind of academic
panic. Oh, I think I know where this is going.
You probably do. So picture this. You are in
school, and you've just stayed up way too late
finishing a massive paper. Right. And you saved
it onto a floppy desk. Wow, really going back
there. Yeah, the classic plastic square. So you
walk into the school computer lab the next morning
feeling, you know, incredibly accomplished. Yeah.
You slide that disk into the drive, and you are
just hit with this sudden icy wave of dread.
Because the computer says the file format is
unrecognized. Exactly. You wrote the entire document
at home using, like, Microsoft works. Oh, man.
But your school's computer lab is strictly a
Microsoft Word environment. That is a deeply
visceral memory for a lot of people. I mean,
you're describing an era where the primary bottleneck
to sharing knowledge wasn't the quality of the
ideas, right? It was the literal physical and
software barriers. Right. Isolated machine. Yeah.
We were fighting this this war of hardware formats
and proprietary file extensions. And that specific
frustration is actually the jumping off point
for today's deep dive. We are looking at a really
fascinating piece by Dr. Gary Ackerman from his
site hackscience .education. It's a great article.
It really is. And he's specifically exploring
ADA compliance in education. Ackerman basically
uses that nostalgic floppy disk panic to make
a really profound point about how far we've actually
come with educational tech. Well, yeah, because
we transitioned away from those nightmare days
of incompatible disks. Right. We moved into a
world dominated by universally recognized file
types and eventually to the seamless cloud networks
that we all rely on today. But the mission of
our deep dive today, what we really want you
to take away from this, is looking at the massive
blind spot we developed along that journey. Because
it turns out we haven't actually solved the whole
puzzle of information sharing. Not at all. I
mean, we spent literal decades and probably billions
of dollars throwing money at the problem of hardware
and software interoperability. That was the holy
grail. Yeah, just getting the machines to talk.
Exactly. And we eventually gravitated toward
universal standards, mostly driven by market
dominance. Microsoft Office established the baseline
for a long time. Right. Word, PowerPoint, Excel.
And then during periods when institutional budgets
were super tight, you saw massive deployments
of open source stuff like OpenOffice just to
keep people on the same page. Yeah, I remember
using that in college. Right. And now that landscape
has shifted almost entirely to the cloud. I mean,
the vast majority of educational institutions
operate within G Suite or Microsoft 365. It's
everywhere. It is. You create a file and it just
lives in this interconnected ecosystem. You can
access it on your phone, in a coffee shop, a
tablet. on a train. A desk hop in a classroom.
Exactly. We successfully solved the machine interoperability
problem, but Ackerman draws a really crucial
distinction here. Right, the human element. Yeah.
We mastered how machines talk to machines, but
we have been remarkably slow to solve human interoperability.
Human interoperability. Such a great phrase.
And I want you, the listener, to critically examine
your own daily digital habits for a moment. It's
a good exercise. Think about the last time you
prepped for a team meeting or maybe you sent
a syllabus to a group of students. You probably
just hit that big blue share link button, right?
Fire it off an email and moved on. Exactly. Mentally
check that task off your list. You assumed your
job was done because the file was floating safely
in the cloud. But true human interoperability
means engineering that information so that absolutely
everyone, regardless of their physical or cognitive
abilities, can actually extract the meaning from
it. Right. And we kind of fell into a trap, didn't
we? Oh, a massive trap of false equivalence.
Because we move from hardware anxiety to cloud
convenience, we assume the cloud magic fix the
whole concept of access. Like, hey, I can open
it so everyone can open it. Exactly. The underlying
logic became the hyperlink resolved successfully
on my screen. Therefore, the information is universally
accessible. We fundamentally misjudged what access
actually requires in practice. OK, let's unpack
this, though. I want to push back slightly, maybe
on behalf of a listener who feels pretty confident
in their current workflow. Sure, go for it. If
an institution is entirely integrated into G
Suite, and literally anyone with the link can
open that Google Doc on a browser and the browser
translates the data into readable text on their
screen. Haven't we technically achieved universal
access? I mean the data packet arrived right.
The text is visible so what's the issue? Well,
that assumes visibility is the only metric for
comprehension. And that fundamentally misinterprets
the legal and, frankly, the functional reality
of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA.
Right, the ADA. It was designed to ensure all
citizens have equal use of information created
by government sources. And as Ackerman points
out in the text, public education is an arm of
the government, so it's bound by those standards.
So it's not just a suggestion? Not at all. We
have to separate the concept of rendering a file
from comprehending a file. Access doesn't just
mean your browser successfully renders a page
without crashing. OK, so what does it mean? Yeah.
It means the author hasn't actively prevented
individuals who use screen reading software or
people who have severe difficulty processing,
like low contrast visual information, from actually
comprehending the material. So if the data packet
arrives but their assistive tech can't parse
it? You haven't provided access. You've just
delivered a locked box. Wow. That reframing.
really completely shifts the burden of responsibility,
doesn't it? It absolutely does. It moves ADA
compliance out of the realm of like an IT networking
problem and drops it squarely onto the desk of
the individual educator or creator. Which is
intimidating for some. Yeah, but it transforms
accessibility from this annoying legal checklist
managed by some distant bureaucracy into a core
daily philosophy of communication. And that shift
is exactly what Ackerman is advocating for. Think
about a student with severe visual impairment
who opens your seamlessly shared cloud document.
Their screen reading software is this incredibly
sophisticated tool designed to translate digital
code into spoken audio. But if that software
encounters a document that wasn't structurally
formatted to be read by a machine... It just
fails. It can't make heads or tails of the text.
At that point, your pristine G Suite link is
functionally just as useless to that student
as your Microsoft Works floppy disk was to the
Microsoft Word computer lab. Oh, that's a brilliant
connection. the barrier to entry isn't a proprietary
floppy drive anymore. No, the barrier is the
author's lazy formatting. Here's where it gets
really interesting, though. When we talk about
how to actually build human accessibility into
the fabric of these files, I keep visualizing
this through the lens of physical architecture.
Oh, I like that. How so? So imagine a standard
10 -page text document is a physical building.
To a sighted person, when an author highlights
a line of text, increases the font size to 16,
and makes it bold at the top of a paragraph.
It acts as a visual signpost. Right. It immediately
signals, hey, a new concept is starting here.
It's the visual equivalent of a doorway. But
a screen reader isn't looking at the paint on
the walls. Exactly. It's software navigating
the foundational blueprint of the document's
code. To that software, just making text bold
means absolutely nothing structurally. Right.
Without the underlying metadata explicitly defining
that text as a heading, that entire 10 -page
document is just a massive, flat, terrifying
wall of noise. That's a great way to put it.
Headings are the structural load -bearing walls
that allow assistive technology to actually navigate
the building. What's fascinating here is that
your architecture analogy perfectly captures
the mechanics of Ackerman's first major directive
for ADA compliance. Which is? Well, the structure
of a document exists in what's called the Document
Object Model, or the DOM. The DOM, right. Yeah.
And that DOM is entirely invisible to a sighted
user who really only cares about the visual output.
But the DOM is the literal universe for a visually
impaired user relying on a screen reader. Because
that's what the software actually reads. Precisely.
Ackerman insists that the very first habit creators
need to build is using the native heading styles
in their word processors. So no more just highlighting
and clicking bold. Exactly. You cannot just highlight
text, bump up the point size, and hit the bold
button. You are required to go to the formatting
ribbon and actively select heading one, heading
two, and so on. OK, because the screen readers,
like JAWS or NVDA, they parse the DOM looking
for those specific HTML tags. Yes. That underlying
tagging architecture is the only way a user can
quickly skip from the introduction straight to
chapter three. Oh, right. Otherwise, they'd have
to listen to the whole thing. Exactly. Imagine
being forced to listen to a robotic voice read
every single syllable of chapters one and two
just to find where chapter three starts. That
sounds agonizing. Yeah. But you know, the friction
here is very real, and Ackerman actually acknowledges
it directly. The aesthetic friction. Yes. The
reason educators and professionals resist using
those built -in heading styles is that the default
aesthetics are often just atrocious. Oh they
can be so ugly. Right. You spend hours crafting
a syllabus with a specific visual identity and
then Microsoft Word or Google Docs insists on
forcing your heading one to be this massive bizarre
shade of light blue aerial font. Which completely
ruins the vibe of your design. Completely. And
it creates a real psychological barrier to compliance.
Nobody wants their presentation to look like
a default template from 2005. They don't. But
the solution Ackerman provides is incredibly
empowering once you realize how simple it is.
What's the trick? You are not locked into those
default aesthetics. The software actually separates
the visual style from the structural metadata.
Oh, so you can change how it looks without breaking
the code. Exactly. You can format a line of text
to use your preferred custom font size and color
and then you just right click the heading 1 button
and select update heading to match selection.
Wait, really? Just right click and update? That's
it. In about three seconds, you've permanently
altered the visual output to match your branding
while simultaneously injecting that invisible
HTML architecture that the screen reader desperately
needs. That is so easy. And Ackerman notes that
if you feel intimidated by the software menus,
a 30 -second conversation with your IT department
will permanently solve the problem for your templates.
So it's really about realizing that visual design
and structural metadata don't have to be enemies.
Beautifully put. And I think that exact same
philosophy applies to the second architectural
element Ackerman focuses on, images. Ah, yes,
alt text. Right. We all know we're supposed to
use alt text, alternative text, for our pictures.
But in the rush of throwing together a slide
deck for a Tuesday morning lecture, it's usually
the first thing that gets skipped. Because we
assume the visual context is self -evident. Exactly.
When a sighted user sees an embedded chart showing
a rising trend line, their brain processes the
implication instantly. Ah, profits are up. But
when a screen reader encounters that image in
the DOM without alt text, it hits a dead end.
In the worst case scenario, it will literally
read the raw file name allowed to the user. Oh,
like image underscore final version 2 .jpg. Yes,
deeply unhelpful. Alt text isn't just a caption.
It's a hidden metadata field where the author
translates the semantic meaning of the visual
element into text. So you're basically acting
as the translator between the visual medium and
the auditory medium. Exactly. The screen reader
parses that hidden field and reads your description
aloud, maintaining the narrative flow of the
lesson. Which brings up a very pragmatic concern.
I can imagine the listener doing the math right
now thinking, OK, wait. I need to structurally
tag every section with custom headings, and I
need to manually translate the semantic meaning
of every single graphic into hidden alt text.
They're wondering about the time commitment.
Yeah. Are we talking about doubling the hours
required to prep a standard slide deck? It is
the most common anxiety whenever a new technical
workflow is introduced. But Ackerman stresses
that ADA compliance does not double your workload.
Really? It sounds like a lot of extra steps.
It just recalibrates how you execute the initial
creation phase. Once building the DOM architecture
becomes muscle memory, the time difference is
negligible. And more importantly, we aren't operating
in an era where you have to manually hunt for
your own mistakes anymore. Oh, right. The tools
have evolved. Exactly. The platforms have evolved
to do the heavy lifting of compliance checking
for you. So we aren't flying blind. We have automated
building inspectors to check if our digital architecture
is up to code. That's a perfect analogy. Let's
look at the Microsoft ecosystem first. Microsoft
Office products now feature an incredibly robust
native accessibility checker. Where do you find
that? You trigger the tool, and it opens a dedicated
pane on the right side of your interface. And
it actively sends the entire DOM of your document
in real time. So it tells you what's broken while
you work. Exactly. It identifies missing alt
text. It highlights skipped heading levels and
flags elements that a screen reader will struggle
with. It essentially gamifies the compliance
process. Oh, I love that. Yeah, you click on
an error, correct the alt text, and the error
vanishes from the pane. There is this deeply
satisfying psychological loop in clearing that
board before you distribute a file. Gamifying
the architecture is such a brilliant way to drive
adoption. But what about the massive segment
of the educational sector that is entirely embedded
in G Suite? That's a good point. Google's native
tools have historically been a bit lighter on
proactive compliance scanning. They have. And
Ackerman specifically addresses that Google ecosystem
gap. For users building out complex presentations
in Google Slides, he highly recommends unspelling
third -party add -ons to handle the inspection.
OK, what does he suggest? He points specifically
to a tool called Grackle Slides. Grackle Slides.
Right. Once integrated, Grackle operates very
similarly to the Microsoft pane. It parses the
Google Slide DOM to ensure the reading order
is logical and tags are present. Because reading
order on slides is notoriously tricky. Oh, it's
a nightmare. So having an automated parser enforce
the structural necessities that the native Google
interface might let you ignore is huge. Yeah,
that sounds like a game changer. But there is
another tool Ackerman mentions that tackles an
entirely different vector of accessibility, color.
Yes, this is crucial. Because up until now, we've
been focusing really heavily on screen readers
and the invisible HTML architecture. But ADA
compliance also protects users who are sighted,
but who struggle with low vision, contrast sensitivity,
or color blindness. And this is where we shift
from structural coding to the actual mathematics
of visual design. Okay, mathematics. Yeah. Ackerman
introduces this free, lightweight piece of software
available for both Mac and PC called the Color
Contrast Analyzer. What does it do? It's designed
to tackle a problem that authors are notoriously
bad at judging subjectively, which is bad color
combinations. Right. A designer might think,
you know, a pastel yellow font on a white background
looks sleek and modern. Oh, I've seen that. But
to a user with contrast sensitivity, that text
literally disappears into the background. I have
absolutely sat in the back of a conference room
squinting at a presentation where the speaker
thought, like... Neon green text on a dark blue
background was a great idea. It's awful. You
can feel the physical strain on your eyes trying
to separate the letters from the background.
Exactly. So what the color contrast analyzer
does is it removes human subjectivity from the
equation entirely. How does it work? It uses
a really simple eyedropper interface. You sample
the background color, and then you sample the
foreground text color. OK. The software immediately
calculates the relative luminance of those two
colors against the strict mathematical ratios
defined by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
The WCEG. Right, the WCAG. For standard text,
the ADA compliance ratio is typically 4 .5 to
1. 4 .5 to 1, OK. The software doesn't give you
design advice. It just gives you a binary objective
result based on that math. You get a green checkmark
indicating the contrast ratio. passes the legal
threshold, or a red X telling you to pick a darker
font. It completely eliminates the guesswork.
Okay, so we've established a really solid workflow
here. Right. We're using custom -styled headings
to build the DOM. Right. We're embedding alt
text, we're running Grackle to check our Google
slides, and we're validating our color ratios.
Muscle memory. Exactly. So once the creation
phase is optimized, the conversation naturally
shifts to distribution. How do we package these
pristine digital architectures and send them
out into the world? And this brings us to the
ubiquitous PDF. Yes, the PDF. In my experience,
a significant portion of professionals view the
save as PDF function as like the ultimate accessibility
mic drop. Whoa, absolutely. The assumption is
that because a PDF is universally viewable and
it locks all your fonts and layout perfectly
in place, it is inherently accessible to everyone.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, the
PDF myth is arguably one of the most dangerous
traps in digital distribution. Really? Yeah.
And it echoes the exact same fallacy we discussed
regarding the cloud. A PDF is a brilliant format
for guaranteeing device universality. A smartphone,
a tablet, or a 15 -year -old desktop can all
render a PDF identically. But rendering pixels
on a screen does not guarantee human interoperability.
When you convert a Word document to a PDF, if
your settings are incorrect, the conversion engine
will strip out the entire DOM. Wait, really?
It just deletes it? It deletes your headings,
erases your alt text, and essentially flightens
the file into a single massive image. Oh, wow.
So you could spend hours building the perfect
invisible architecture. Yeah. And the moment
you click Save as PDF, you basically bulldoze
the entire building. You obliterate the architecture.
A visually impaired student opens the PDF, and
their screen reader just reports a blank document.
That is heartbreaking. It is. So, Ackerman is
very clear on this. If you utilize PDFs... you
must use Adobe Acrobat's native accessibility
checker. You have to ensure that the conversion
process explicitly included document tags, which
is essentially Adobe's version of the DOM architecture.
You cannot assume the format handles compliance
automatically. The tags must survive the export.
Making sure the structure survives the export
is a great rule of thumb for static documents.
But modern education and corporate communication
aren't just text anymore. Far from it. We are
heavily reliant on the video frontier. We're
dealing with moving images, synchronized sound,
dynamic visual information. How do we ensure
human interoperability when we introduce dual
sensory streams? Video is the ultimate accessibility
hurdle, honestly, because you are demanding the
user process auditory and visual data simultaneously,
and building a DOM tree doesn't help someone
who can't hear the audio track. So what's the
solution? Ackerman breaks down a highly strategic,
incredibly efficient workflow for tackling video
compliance. Instead of struggling with native
video files and trying to manually code caption
files, which is awful, he advises leveraging
the infrastructure of YouTube. Now this is interesting
because institutional IT departments often push
back against public platforms. But Ackerman is
advocating for standard YouTube as the primary
hosting solution. Yes, specifically for its backend
tools. Because YouTube has spent billions of
dollars perfecting automatic speech recognition,
or ASR. Oh, the auto -captions. Exactly. When
you upload a video to YouTube, their algorithms
automatically parse the audio track and generate
a timed transcript. So you don't have to manually
sync the timestamps of the text. to the video
frames. No, which is historically the most agonizing
part of captioning. It takes forever. It really
does. But with YouTube, the creator simply enters
the studio dashboard, opens the auto -generated
captions, and just corrects the inevitable spelling
errors or missed punctuation. Just a quick cleanup.
Exactly. By cleaning up that auto -generated
transcript, you instantly provide an accurate,
synchronized, closed captioning track. You bridge
the gap. That's amazing. Yeah. or hard of hearing
student can read the exact spoken content in
real time, completely integrating them into the
flow of the presentation. It is genuinely remarkable
how powerful these tools are when you actively
choose to engage with the mechanics behind them.
It takes very little time once you know they're
there. Right. And when you step back and look
at the arc of this entire conversation, it represents
a massive paradigm shift in how we view our responsibilities
as creators. It really does. I mean, we started
with the purely nostalgic frustration of hardware
incompatibility, the MSWorks floppy disk failing
in the MS Word lab. The dark ages. Yeah. And
then we recognized that graduating to device
agnostic cloud systems like G Suite didn't actually
solve the core human problem. Right. The data
packets were arriving, but the information was
still heavily encrypted by formatting barriers
that locked out millions of people. Because we
spent decades celebrating the fact that the technology
could finally deliver the file without pausing
to ask if the human could actually decode the
file once it arrived. Yes. We forgot about the
human at the end of the line. But Ackerman's
roadmap proves that the decoding process doesn't
require a degree in computer science. It just
requires intentionality. Just a few extra clicks.
Exactly. We understand the necessity of using
built -in headings to construct an avocable DOM
tree instead of just painting the walls with
bold text. We understand the semantic translation
required for alt text so images can be heard
and not just seen. We know to leverage automated
parsers like Grackle for Google Slides, the Microsoft
Checkers, and the objective mathematics of the
Color Contrast Analyzer to make sure our designs
aren't inadvertently hiding data. And tagging
our PDFs. Yes, ensuring PDFs survive the export
and using YouTube's ASR infrastructure for video
accessibility. It's a comprehensive, highly manageable
toolkit. It is. So to you, the listener, the
next time you sit down to draft a document, build
a presentation or share a critical update. I
want you to remember that taking a few extra
moments to run an accessibility checker is the
literal difference between broadcasting your
ideas into a void and guaranteeing your work
can actually be experienced by everyone. Intentionality
is the dividing line between rendering data and
sharing knowledge. And, you know, I want to leave
you with one final thought to ponder. Oh, please
do. Something that builds on the technical context
of Ackerman's work, but looks toward the immediate
rapidly approaching horizon. If you explore Dr.
Ackerman's site, you'll notice in the sidebar
that he produces a podcast called Hutral Plus
Classroom. OK. And one of his episodes delves
into the deeply complex topic of bias in AI decision
making. Wow. That is an incredibly urgent topic
given how quickly workflows are changing right
now. It is the defining technological shift of
this decade. I mean, we are currently witnessing
the explosive integration of generative AI into
our daily software. What's everywhere? We are
increasingly prompting AI agents to automatically
generate our slide decks, draft our foundational
syllabi, and instantly format our corporate documents
just to save time. Sure, super convenient. But
the provocative architectural question is this.
As we eagerly hand over the digital heavy lifting
to these algorithms, are these generative AI
tools being rigorously trained to automatically
construct proper DOM trees? Are they enforcing
ADA contrast ratios natively and generating semantic
alt text by default? Oh. That's a good question.
Or are these models simply scraping the vast,
historically inaccessible internet, learning
from our decades of lazy formatting, and mass
producing our inaccessible blind spots at an
unprecedented automated scale? Wow. It is a structural
question to deeply consider the next time you
ask an algorithm to quickly generate a file.
Are you using AI to automate human accessibility,
or are you just automating the barriers?