MN-GRIN 12/17/2025 Meeting Recap

[DeAnna Lilienthal]

Thank you for attending our December 17, 2025 Meeting on accessibility presented by Jay Wyant, Minnesota’s first Chief Information Accessibility Officer.

Attached is the slide deck from Jay's presentation.

One of the attendees asked a question that Jay needed to do some checking before responding and we're including that for you.

Question:

Do you just leave the space where you will put the form field? Usually people add a line. Should we still add the line or does the screen reader read that?

Answer:

Here's what our local PDF expert says:

I put the underlines in for the text fields in the Word document. While it can be done in Acrobat, I feel I have more control in Word. You can see the underlines in the screenshot above. I type the word, press the space bar one time, press the tab key one time, and then adjust the spacing. I then highlight the tab marker and underline it using the underline feature found in the Font group on the Home tab.

Your example should be:

Name:               

(with the underline long enough for the name field, but I am limited with what I can do in an email)

Jay's note: so you can do it either way. As to whether the underline interferes with AT users, note that it uses the underline function, rather than a line drawing.

Hope that helps.

Thank for attending from the MN-GRIN Coordinating Committee. We are tentatively looking at an alternate date due to speaker availability. Please save the date of January 14, 2026 for our next meeting with the topic of AI. Once we confirm with our speaker we will send out full meeting details.

Any questions or if you have a topic or speaker you'd like us to use for a future meeting, please let us know.