The train journey as the accessibility police

 Yesterday I traveled back from London on a train after attending an awards ceremony. Opposite was a lady working on a big document on her laptop. I watched her typing and noticed a considerable amount of scrolling up and down her document. 

With the corner of my eye I kept watching, not because I’m nosy but just wanted to watch someone craft a document. Her scrolling was her working out her working out her changing page numbers as she added content so she could update her table of contents, a TABLE of contents.

The accessibility police within me wanted to lean over and show her how headings could be applied so she could generate a table of contents, but also use a navigation pane to avoid the continuous scrolling up and down to find the bit she was working on. I didn’t though, I just continued to observe.

It made me wonder how many people just don’t know how about applying in-built headings, using the navigation pane and the auto-generated table of contents. It’s something I rely on to make processes more efficient and saves considerable time when making a document, never mind the benefits for accessibility and providing navigation elements for a screen reader.

It made me realise that the work, basic skills model implementation and research I want to do would benefit so many, including this woman on the train.

From here I got out a pen and started making notes on the back of my printed awards tickets from the night before, and a methodological framework and more ideas for my research started to form. 

I thought to myself imagine one day being on a train and watching someone apply headings as the ‘norm’, not have to clumsily scroll up and down to keep working out changes in page numbers, imagine the time saved for that person, just imagine the satisfaction of making that happen.

Currently most skills people have in Word are self-taught, but imagine with some scaffolding you could use efficient practices to make your own life easier and be accessible at the same time… just imagine!




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