Making Your Presentations Accessible
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Introduction
There are many presentation tools available both on-line such as Google Doc Presentation tools and for Apple Mac - iWork Keynote or the freely downloadable Open Office Impress. The points to consider mentioned below apply to most presentation software applications.
For Microsoft Office 2007 users – remember to save as ‘PowerPoint 97 - 2003’ to ensure backward compatibility – not everyone will have downloaded the compatibility plug-in for earlier versions of software.
Considerations:
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Use the slide layout schemes (menu - format – slide layout for Office 2003) offered by PowerPoint to ensure all titles and text are seen in the outline view.
- Add ‘alt-text’ descriptions to all images via the picture format – size and position (Office 2007) or web tab (Office 2003).
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Ensure colour contrast levels between the background and text allow for easy reading. Avoid watermarks and busy patterns and keep to minimal the amount of information on each slide – Try to use sans serif fonts.
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Ensure captioning is included with video and audio files before adding to the presentation or at the very least add clear descriptions for each change in the video or a transcript of the audio file and descriptions for all Flash files added to the presentation. (see additional resources)
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Ensure graphs and diagrams are described in the notes section seen below the slide edit pane.
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Add further textual descriptions to the notes section to enhance understanding and where appropriate add links to references.
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Use LecShare or Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard (see below) to convert your PowerPoint file to a web page. If you wish to do this from PowerPoint itself make sure all graphics and other content is available in the outline view and/or the notes section then select File > Save as Web Page. Make sure to save the file as Web Page and not Single File Web Page.
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Provide the original PPT and Save as RTF or text file once you have checked your outline view contains all the relevant text.
Additional Resources
- Skills for Access Provide text equivalents for audio - general advice on captions
- JISC TechDis Accessibility Essentials 3: Creating accessible presentations
- WebAIM additional information at with support for the Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard
- Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard for XP Office 2003 at present, not Vista Office 2007
- LecShare Inc works with Office 2003 and 2007 to help make accessible PowerPoint presentations quickly and very easily with output in video, HTML and MS Word
- Guide to ‘avoiding death by bullet point’ (PPT download) with good design advice from Adam Warren, Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit, University of Southampton.
- PowerPoint Viewer 2003 for Windows, for those who do not have PowerPoint installed:
- PowerPoint Viewer 2007 for Windows
- PowerPoint 98 Viewer for Mac
- Adobe (Macromedia) "Building an Accessible Microsoft PowerPoint presentation." Making PowerPoint slides ready for accessible Breeze presentations.
- S5 as alternative web presentation tool for presentations from Eric Meyer.
