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Accessibility: Presentations

This guide provides resources for making instructional content accessible.

Making Presentations Accessible

Accessibility and Presentations

Presentations tend to be highly visual, and people who are blind or have low vision can understand them more easily if you create your slides with accessibility in mind.

 

Key Presentation Accessibility Tips:
  • Use built-in templates and layouts.
  • Give each slide a unique title.
  • Add alternative text descriptions to images.
  • Use bulleted and numbered lists.
  • Avoid the use of text boxes (use content placeholders on template layouts instead).
  • Tab through each slide to ensure correct reading order.

Making PowerPoint Accessible

Evaluate Your PowerPoint

If you are using PowerPoint in your OER you need to determine if they are accessible.

The PowerPoint Accessibility Checker helps you find and fix accessibility issues. It creates a report of the issues it finds, and explains why each issue might create a problem. Finally, it tells you how to fix the issue.

To run the accessibility checker in Windows:

  1. Select "File"
  2. Select "Check for Issues: Inspect Presentation"
  3. Select the "Check Accessibility" in the dropdown menu

To run the accessibility checker on a Mac:

  1. Select Review > Check Accessibility.

If you get a message saying "Unable to run the Accessibility Checker. Cannot check the current file type for accessibility issues"  it just means the file has not been saved to the newest "pptx" version.  

  1. Select "Save As"
  2. Choose "PowerPoint Presentation (*.pptx)"
  3. Run "Check Accessibility" again and you will now see any accessibility issues

Creating Accessible Powerpoint Presentations

Other Presentation Tools

At the moment PREZI is often inaccessible to disabled people. If you have to use PREZI the following are some guidelines to assist you in making it as accessible as possible.

Improving the Accessibility of PREZI

  • Always ensure you have a full version of the presentation in an alternative format that can be emailed out in advance as well as paper copies of the individual slides. Having a full copy of the overall layout of the presentation may be useful for some users.
  • Make sure the fact the presentation is available in alternative formats is clearly advertised to users.
  • When using movement ensure the movement to the new screen happens first and then the text arrives statically afterwards i.e. use automation to display text/images once movement to new Path Step is complete.
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