Making Your Presentations Accessible

There are many presentation tools available both on-line such as Google Slides and for Apple Mac – Keynote or the freely downloadable Open Office Impress. The points to consider mentioned below apply to most presentation software applications.

If you want to make sure your Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2013/2016/2019 presentation works with pre-2007 versions turn on compatibility mode to save it as a .ppt rather than .pptx.

Considerations:

  • Use the slide layout themes (Menu > Design >Themes and Home > Layout) offered by PowerPoint to ensure all titles and text are seen in the outline view.
  • Ensure captioning and transcripts are 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 plus a transcript of the audio file and descriptions for all Flash files added to the presentation. (see additional resources)
  • Add further textual descriptions to the notes section to enhance understanding and where appropriate add links to references.
  • Use Office Accessibility Checker to check through the elements within your slides that are not accessible. This can be found under File > Check for Issues.

Additional Resources