Google Docs and Accessibility, Part 4: The Other Stuff

Other Stuff? What Other Stuff?
In the Google Docs app grouping at the time of this writing there are a few other capabilities: Drawings, Collections, and Forms. We're going to tackle all three today.

Drawings: Remember Microsoft Paint? Google has essentially brought a Paint-like basic image-creation tool to the web. Drawings currently exports in four formats: .png, .jpg, .svg, and .pdf.
Collections: Collections are a way of organizing all of your Google Docs into related groups. It's not quite the same as folders, as a Doc can exist in multiple collections. For example, a document with the recipe for your Great-Aunt Tillie's fruit cake could be both in "Family Recipes" and "Holiday Excitement" collections.
Forms: Create forms or surveys that can be emailed or embedded in a website. It's also possible to invite others to fill out the form by directing them (by email or link) to the specific forms page, if it's shared. On the other end, data entered into the form is automatically loaded into a Google Docs Spreadsheet for you to analyze, which is a pretty nifty function. An example of an embedded form is below.

Making the Switch

Yes indeed, Google has how-to documents for Drawings, Forms, and Collections. If you've been reading this blog so far, though, you've probably worked out that I'm a fan of multiple ways of getting information. What I'm running into, race fans, is that it's difficult to find instruction videos and other how-to sites that are actually accessibly created; that is, the videos are captioned, the site doesn't use mouse-only functions, etc. I'm also picky enough to want reasonably current information. ::big sigh:: Darn it, I was hoping to be done with the Goodle Apps stuff after this post. Instead, it looks like I may need to create these resources. If you have ideas about this, have located relatively up-to-date and reasonably accessible how-tos, or if (please?) you'd like to help in my efforts to create some, please wave your hand in the comments!

The Bottom Line: Accessibility

The NFB complaint I mentioned last time seems to be affecting Google already. When I went to the Google Accessibility pages today, they'd received a face lift and some new information. One of those changes, by the way, is a feedback form. Use it!

Perhasp this is a positive sign that Google will be putting in efforts to make their Apps offerings more accessible. Keep in mind that the information here is based on what I see in Google Apps today. Given the nature of software-as-a-service and cloud-based computing, there will be changes and they'll be released as we all use the product, rather than waiting for a specific release date. Just wanted to make that clear.

Drawings

This one is quick and dirty. Drawings is very much a visual application, with little support for either screenreader or keyboard users. Like other Google Docs apps, there are some keyboard shortcuts built into Drawings.

Collections

Collections is a mouse-dependent feature, which makes accessibility for keyboard users and screenreader users not workable.

Forms

I was actually a little surprised that Forms was more accessible than I thought it would be, both on the creation side and the respondent side. I use the Firefox extension Fangs to quickly emulate what a screenreader would process. I was pleasantly surprised to find more labeling of the form elements than I anticipated. Moving between questions and the responses possible for each question worked easily with the keyboard. Of course, we do run into the same problems with Google Spreadsheets that I've already discussed when handling the collected data. It might be workable, however, in the real world, to use Google Forms to collect the data and then download the results from Spreadsheets to a standard spreadsheet program to do the analysis.

Unique Ways Google Docs' Other Stuff Benefits Students with Disabilities

Simplicity and sharing. Said it before, and I'll probably say it again. These two issues alone make Google Docs worthwhile for students with learning or other cognitive disabilities. Forms, for example, certainly makes data collection simple and easy to put together (once you do the hard work of actually constructing appropriate questions in the first place).

Here is a fun way of explaining how beneficial the automatic saving and backup capabilities of Google Docs are. I'm particularly tickled that this video is nicely captioned. Though the video describes the benefits of the Chrome Notebook, the benefits of saving and backup are the same regardless of the hardware you're using.