Making Accessible Educational DocumentsMaking Accessible Educational DocumentsText boxes are those little enclosed containers of information placed within and around formal articles or text. They may be square in shape, have rounded edges, have colored backgrounds, or be simply boxed in text.
In printed materials like newspapers and magazines, text boxes are often used as a way of supporting the main topic of the article or story and often provide some incidental or related information. In textbooks and curricular materials, the text box may be used to highlight some aspect of the content adding richness and background to the text's information, providing background or ancillary information to the student. For this Teachers' Tip, I have placed an "empty" text box to the right to illustrate the concept.
| Text box content goes in here. For this example, the text is simply enclosed with a box and aligned to the right side of the page. |
In print publishing, a text box can be located almost anywhere on a page. It is often blocked or boxed text and may sometimes take up the whole side of a page of text. This type of text box is sometimes called a "sidebar."
On the printed page, text box can be very useful and "eye catching". But in digital text, these features can sometimes create big problems for people using assistive technology (AT). Here's why.
Unlike a printed page where a reader may arbitrarily scan the headlines, text, sidebars or photos on a page in any order, people using AT to read digital text must read the content in a sequential manner. That is, they must read everything starting at the top of the page to the bottom. While they can jump around a little bit by moving from link to link or from Heading to Heading, the process is still linear in nature starting at the beginning of the document and continuing to the end. When the screen reader encountered something written in a text box it will occasionally read the text box as though it was part of the adjoining text. When this happens - usually without the reader knowing what has occurred - the result can be confusion and disorientation. This phenomenon can often occur when documents are converted into Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Care must therefore be taken to test the PDF with Adobe Acrobat Professional to specifically check the "reading order" of the document. The Accessibility checker wizard in Acrobat Professional will do this as part of the accessibility test and will also provide the user with specific directions on how to remedy any errors that it finds.
By the way, I converted this document, originally written in MS-Word (2007) to PDF using the Acrobat converter plug-in that gets installed with Acrobat Professional, and the resulting PDF was converted correctly, making the reading order start with the Heading 1 (the title), go though the body of the text of the document and end with the text box I inserted above.
Good job, A+.
To play it safe, educators creating digital documents should avoid using text boxes, or if using them, do so sparingly.
(coming soon)
Maine CITE provides additional resources that can help you with your goal of creating accessible documents. http://www.mainecite.org/awd/
John Brandt is a web designer and consultant who works with the Maine CITE Program in the area of accessibility and universal design. He may be reached at jeb@jebswebs.com