Develop Accessible PowerPoint Presentations Training Video and Transcript

Welcome to the Develop and Deliver Accessible Presentations course. This is part one, which is creating an accessible PowerPoint presentation. I'm Kristina England, the Digital Accessibility Specialist for the President's Office, and I'll be facilitating this training. During this training, we'll go over the following topics.

Why accessible PowerPoints matter, the importance of using an accessible PowerPoint template, PowerPoint design components to avoid, general best practices, how to ensure equal access to images and graphs, the Accessibility Checker and PDF considerations, and finally, ongoing verification, how to use the PowerPoint accessibility checklist. Let's go over why accessible PowerPoints matter.

Accessibility is critical for equal access to a presentation. When a presentation is not made accessible, the disability community can run into various barriers, including poor color contrast, inaccessible images and graphs, incorrect slide reading order, animations that can trigger health issues, and more. The disability community makes up at least 26% of the American population. That's 1 in 4 Americans.

A critical aspect of providing an accessible presentation is the ability to send out the presentation ahead of time. This allows anyone using assistive technology to follow along with your presentation in the format that they need. Now that we've gone over why accessible PowerPoints matter, let's talk about using an accessible template. An accessible template has key accessibility elements built in.

You will receive access to an accessible PowerPoint template as part of this learning path. Note that the communications office will be updating their templates, so once the new accessible PowerPoint template is published, you will switch to the new branding. The template in this learning path includes the following built-in features. Correct reading order of slides.

All slide layouts have been built into the Slide Master to ensure they are exposed correctly to assistive technology. And finally, an accessible font and font size has been selected for all slide layouts. What is an accessible font and font size? An accessible font is one that is familiar and readable, such as Times New Roman, Arial, and Verdana. We have set the default font for the PowerPoint template to Verdana.

The recommended font size for PowerPoint is 18 points or higher. We have set the main content of slides to 20 points with sub-bullets at 18 points. When using the accessible PowerPoint template, always use the layouts under new slide or slide layout to retain accessibility. The slide designs under the new slide and layout options on the Home tab are designed with accessibility in mind.

If you do need to create a custom slide design, such as a slide that will have more than two content boxes, you should create a new layout design in the Slide Master. Creating the new layout in the Slide Master ensures the content of your slides exports correctly when alternative formats are needed. It also ensures the content displays in the outline view.

Now that we've gone over the importance of using layouts under new slide or layout, I'd like to show you how to access both of those components. What you want to do is make sure you select the Home menu item in Microsoft PowerPoint, and then look for the new slide menu item. When I select that, I get a dropdown where I can choose from the pre-designed layouts. I have title slide, title no image, section header, one content box, two content boxes, six content boxes, and a quote slide layout.

So that's how you would add a new slide and retain the layout formatting. And then let's say you want to change the format of a slide that you've already created. That's where you can go to Layout, and once you select a new layout, the layout of that existing slide will change. So I just selected six content boxes on a slide where I had two content boxes.

I now have six content boxes to work with. I'll have to adjust the design of the slide because I was only using a two content box layout. But now I have that in there as six content boxes and it will retain that when I export this content in alternative formats and when I go to the Outline View. And how you get to the Outline View is if you go from the Home tab to the View tab and you look for Outline View.

It is the second one on the View tab. I select Outline View, and what's going to happen is I'm going to have it expand and show me the whole outline of this presentation. I should be able to see any of the content I've built into slides within this Outline View. If I don't, that's because the layout wasn't generated through the Slide Master. So you do want to watch for that. It's an easy way to check if you retain the accessibility of the content.

One thing I want to show you is if there is a layout that you need that is not available in the layouts, you can go in and you can customize, but you must do it through the Slide Master, as mentioned before. So what we're going to do is we're going to stay on the View tab in PowerPoint and you are going to look for the Slide Master. Go ahead and select the Slide Master menu item.

The Slide Master will open. And you'll want to find where you want to insert the new layout. I'm going to insert it after the two text box layout and I'm going to select Insert layout. So now I've inserted a layout, but I want to be able to add placeholder content. And in this case, I'm going to create a layout with four text boxes. So I'm going to select Insert Placeholder in the Slide Master menu and I'm going to select Content.

Content will give me the ability to put images or text or graphs, anything I need in here, so it is the most flexible design for the placeholder content. I'm going to draw my first box. And then I'll go ahead and again, I'm going to go to Slide Master, Insert Content, go ahead and select my second box. Make these more even. They won't be perfect in this training, but you'll get the idea. Going to go back to Slide Master, insert my next box.

And then go back to Slide Master and insert my fourth box under Insert Placeholder. And the last thing I want to do is I want to go to the Home tab while I'm in the Slide Master and I want to select a range. A range is going to show me-- when I select a range, I have a dropdown. I want to go to selection pane. And this is where I'm going to determine if I actually need to change the reading order of the content under these new layouts.

The content basically is read-- if I go ahead and tab into here, it is read based on the tabbing order or based on the order that's in the selection pane. So if I tap into Click to Edit Master Title Slide, that is the first thing I'll be able to reach if I was a keyboard user or a screen reader user. And if I tab again, what's happening is because when I created a new layout, I only had the title and the slide number, slide number comes second.

I don't want that to come second. I want my first text box on the page on the left side of the slide to be the next thing in the keyboard order. So what I'm going to do is look for that one and drag it right after title. And I'm going to do that with the rest of these. Just go ahead and drag and drop them until they are in the right order.

And so now I have title first, content-- the first content placeholder, the one to the right of that, then to the bottom left, and then to the bottom right. And finally, I have the slide number in the selection pane. And so that's how you go ahead and create a new slide layout. The only other thing you might want to do is make sure it has a name that is easy to remember. So if I go back to the Slide Master tab and I select Rename, it just says custom layout. That's the default.

And I'm going to say four boxes, and rename that one. And then I'm going to select Close Master View under the Slide Master tab and go back to my presentation. So again, that's how to add a new layout behind the scenes, and that will keep it accessible when content is exported into other formats, and it will make the content show in the Outline View. Now let's cover Microsoft PowerPoint design components to avoid.

The first one to avoid is using PowerPoint transitions. PowerPoint transitions are animated, so anyone with motion sensitivity can have seizures, vertigo, migraines, or motion sickness triggered depending on the movement the transition makes and their health condition. If you do need to use a transition effect between slides, always avoid ones that slide in, slide out, flash, or have complex animated effects that could trigger someone's health condition.

The PowerPoint template you will receive access to in this training has transitioned shut off by default. An important reminder. Motion sensitivity is a spectrum. So what doesn't trigger one person's health condition can trigger another person's health condition. You should also use the animations component with care. The animations component in PowerPoint allows you to time the loading of content in a specific PowerPoint slide.

When doing this, you should always remove this function when sending out the presentation to attendees. The PowerPoint animations that load content on the slide by mouse click create accessibility issues for anyone using assistive technology. In addition, stick to the appear animation option and avoid the more complex options such as blinds and fly in so you avoid triggering a health condition. Avoid using animated content in your PowerPoint.

Avoid content that slides in and out and any flashing content. These effects can trigger migraines, vertigo, nausea, and seizures. Also avoid fast moving, spiraling, or jarring animations, as they can trigger vertigo and can be distracting for the neurodivergent and low vision communities. Neurodivergence includes the ADHD and autistic communities.

If you need to use animated content, always provide a warning. Also, test the animation with PEAT or the Online Flash Test. A link to both of these testing resources will be available in this learning path. Finally, I want to conclude this topic with a quote by Essie Smith in the article "My War on Animation." I am constantly navigating around the desperate desire to avoid animations, ducking out of zooms when people start running animations on their PowerPoints.

Now that we've gone over PowerPoint design components to avoid, let's go over some general best practices when creating your PowerPoint. First, make sure to follow plain language guidelines. Address your reader directly. Write in an active voice. Write brief and clear sentences. Use built-in lists to convey three or more ideas that tie into a broader theme. Lists are more scannable and easier to understand.

And finally, avoid using abbreviations, jargon, and complex language. If you need to use any of these, define what they mean the first time you use them. For example, if you use an abbreviation such as SME, spell it out and put the abbreviation in parentheses, such as subject matter expert, parentheses, SME. Always stick to built in style components and reading alignment. Use the built-in bulleted and numbered list to list out key points on each slide. I'll go over how to do this in a minute.

Use a bulleted list when the order of your list does not matter. Use a numbered list when you want to convey a specific order such as process steps. Always left align your content. Left aligned content is easier to read than centered content, and justified content can create readability issues for both the dyslexic and low vision communities. Now I want to show you quickly where the bulleted and numbered lists can be found. So I'm going to go to the Home tab in PowerPoint.

And when I'm on the Home tab on PowerPoint, I have several menu items. What you want to look for is the Paragraph section. I'm going to go ahead and click on the text on my slide, and under paragraph section, you will find the bullets functionality. That's an unordered list. And you'll find the numbering functionality. You do want to stick to what's in the built-in bullets and numbering formats to make sure that you keep this in an accessible format.

And that's how you access those. You'll also notice under the Paragraph section we have alignments, and it's defaulted to left alignment. And as already noted, you should stick to left alignment of your slide content. You also want to provide a unique title for each slide. The title is the first element on each PowerPoint slide, and it is the first thing a blind or low vision person using a screen reader will find in the standard layout.

A unique title for each slide allows screen reader users to scan a PowerPoint to find a specific slide when they want to review information on that slide. The title also appears in the Outline View of the PowerPoint is essential aspect of creating alternative formats when requested. I'll show you where it appears on the outline slide now. So let me go ahead and escape out of my presentation. And I am on the Slideshow tab. I'm going to go to the View tab and, again, access the Outline View.

And when I access the Outline View and I'm going to scroll up, I have a left side panel that just opened. Each slide, the title of that slide appears bolded, and it's the first item within the outline. So we have to develop and deliver accessible presentations. We have training agenda as the title for the second slide. Why accessible PowerPoints matter for the third slide, et cetera.

And so that is actually the title of the slides. So you want to keep that in mind when you are naming these slides, because if five slides have the same name, that slide name is meaningless to screen reader users when they're using the outline view to scan the content of your PowerPoint. You also always want to create accessible tables in PowerPoint. In order to do this, you need to create it using the built-in PowerPoint table feature. Do not Copy-Paste from another file.

When you insert the table, ensure you do the following. Assign a header row. This will make the table content accessible to anyone using a screen reader. Do not merge cells. This will reduce the accessibility of the table. Do not use color to convey meaning. For example, do not shade cells as green to indicate a complete status. Instead, add a column with a status. Also, use simple tables that don't reduce the readability of the content with smaller fonts.

Link to an Excel spreadsheet for long complex tables so the low vision community can use zoom and magnification tools. Now let's go over how to create accessible tables. I'm going to escape my PowerPoint show and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go to the Home tab on PowerPoint. I'm going to select New Slide. And I'm going to go ahead and select one content box. And I'm going to go ahead and name this slide an accessible table example.

Then what I want to do is in the text box, there are options to select. I want to go ahead and select the ability to insert a table. I'm going to go ahead and insert a table with three columns and three rows. Go ahead and select OK. And what I want to do is this is a perfect table. It has a header row already designated, but I just want to double check.

I'm in the Table Design now because there's now a Table Design tab, and header row is selected. So that's perfect because that's going to convey to assistive technology users that that header row is associated with the cells below it. And so then I can literally enter group name, favorite food, number of participants.

And those are my header row. Those are the names of each of my header row items. And then for group name, I'm going to associate group A. For favorite food for group A, I'm going to say salmon with potatoes. And then I'll say there were 15 participants. And then group B prefers chicken with potatoes. And again, that was 15 people that participated.

And so that is an accessible table. If I were to start merging cells, that would immediately cause a conflict with assistive technology. We wouldn't be able to associate group A with the group name if say, group A and salmon with potatoes were merged cells. So just keep in mind, simple table, the best. It has to be inserted via PowerPoint. You can't Copy-Paste it in. Don't merge cells, and always ensure your header row is checked off. Do not use color alone to convey meaning.

When designing content in your presentation, ensure you convey meaning through the content, not just through color. Use color to enhance design but not drive it. Why? Blind people can't see color at all, people with low vision may have a hard time seeing colors, and people who are color blind may have a hard time distinguishing between certain combinations of colors such as red and green.

If you decide to use color to enhance the design of your content, ensure the foreground and background you select meet color contrast guidelines by checking them with the WebAIM Contrast Checker. The Contrast Checker is available via the resources section of this learning path. You should also use descriptive links when adding links to your PowerPoint. You should use descriptive links so that the blind, deafblind, and low vision communities can scan links in your slides.

Never use Click Here or Read More. Link names should match the title of the content you plan to point to. For example, if you are linking to the 2024 financial aid report, the link name should be 2024 financial aid report. Don't worry about length. Too long is better than too short. You can also add a short description when needed to clarify the link. That short description could come before or after the link.

If you do decide to Copy-Paste the descriptive link into Zoom chat during a presentation from your PowerPoint, that descriptive link will retain its accessibility. I'm going to show you quickly how to add a descriptive link to a PowerPoint slide. So I am going to escape out of this slide. And I'm going to go ahead and select 2024 financial aid report on my slide presentation.

I'm going to go out to the internet quickly and I'm going to grab that link. Financial aid FY 2024. I'm going to Control-C. And I'll go back to my PowerPoint. And what I want to do is I want to go to the Insert tab at the top of PowerPoint, and you want to look for links. And I'm going to insert a link, so I'm going to select the link option. Then I'm going to go down to the address field and Control-V. And I'm going to select OK.

And now I have a descriptive link within my PowerPoint slide called 2024 financial aid report. If I were to click on it, it would go off to the UMass pay site to the 2024 financial aid report. When including videos or audio clips in your PowerPoint presentation, you should ensure they are accessible. To do this, ensure you are fully including the deaf, hard of hearing, and deafblind communities in the audio content of a video or audio clip.

You can do this by ensuring embedded videos have captions and an accompanying transcript. A transcript is the text version of any speech and non-speech information. Non-speech audio includes sounds such as laughter or clapping. Ensure any audio files include a link to a transcript. And if your video you are sharing contains visual elements not described in the video, check with your audience on if anyone needs a video description that conveys the visuals prior to the presentation.

Video descriptions provide the blind, low vision, and deafblind community with similar visual descriptions to what is contained in alt text. Instead, however, you are describing the visuals in the video itself. Now let's cover how to provide equal access to images and graphs. The first thing to do is provide alternative text for any images in your PowerPoint. Alternative text provides equal access to your images for the blind, deafblind, and low vision community.

What qualifies as an image in PowerPoint? Charts and graphs. Clip art. Icons. Pictures. Shapes. And SmartArt. It should be noted that there are additional steps that need to happen with SmartArt that we'll go over later in this course. What is good alternative text? Alternative text should describe key information in an image that a blind, deafblind, or low vision person would need for equal access to that image.

If you are using an icon of a question mark, for example, the alt text could be question mark icon. If you are sharing a photo, the content could describe key details of that photo. I have a photo on the right and I have described this photo as follows. A woman with red hair wears a lab coat and goggles. She wears a blue latex glove on her right hand and holds a vapor emitting container in a laboratory hallway.

While basic alt text is great for icons and images, you should also include chart descriptions for charts and graphs. While alt text will benefit the blind and deafblind community, a chart description can benefit anyone having a hard time reading a complex chart, including the neurodivergent community, e.g. dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, autism, et cetera. Dyscalculia affects a person's ability to understand number based information and math.

Alt text also cannot convey semantics such as bulleted content or headings. When a graph is too complex and requires the accompanying content to be structured in an easy to digest way, it's best to add the overall chart description below the graph or chart. Here is an example of a chart description for a pie chart. In this example, I have the FY25 expense categories. The chart description is as follows.

A pie chart showing FY25 expense categories. Salaries make up 45% of expenses. Non-personnel make up 28%. Fringe is 14%. Deprecation is 9%. Interest is 3%. And scholarships and fellowships is 1%. The total expenses for the fiscal year are 4.3 billion. In this example, because we have the detailed chart description, the alt text would read as a chart description of the FY25 expense categories is included on this slide.

Now I'm going to show you how to add alt text to an image, a chart, an icon, or a shape. It's all the same steps. So I'm going to escape out of my slide and I'm going to make sure I select the image, in this case, the graph, that I want to add alt text to. This is the pie chart that I just described previously. And so I'm going to select that, and what you want to do is you want to find the Format tab in PowerPoint.

I'm going to select the Format tab and I'm going to look for the alt text menu item and select that. And now over on the right side, I do have the graph description that it's requesting. And in this case, because we have the chart description, what I'm going to do is just enter that alt text I mentioned before, a chart description of the FY25 expense categories is included on the slide.

And that is how you add the alt text. You can just close out the pane, and that automatically saves the alt text for the image. When creating your graphs and charts, also ensure they meet color contrast guidelines. The low vision and colorblind community often runs into issues with poor contrast on graphs and charts. The best way to design graphs and charts is by using gradient colors, i.e. shades of the same blue or shades of the same green.

You can also use patterns for more complex graphs with over eight data points, but keep your patterns simple and easy to decipher. Two great tools to use to define your chart colors are Chroma.js Color Palette. You can use this to define your gradients by entering in your darkest color first and letting the gradients be generated, and Viz Palette. You can use this open source tool to test out how the Chroma.js Color Palette will work on graphs and even test what the colors would look like in grayscale.

Here are some additional design best practices to implement for charts and graphs. Depending on how much data you are showing, you may want to link to an accompanying table with the source data. Ensure that data points are labeled clearly. Use both visual cues and text labels to convey the values represented by each point on the graph. This practice assists users who are color blind, chronically ill, neurodivergent, or anyone that is stressed and overtired.

Ensure the text in your graph is readable. The smaller the text, the harder it will be to read. Also, always stick with a familiar and readable font such as Arial, Times New Roman, or Verdana. Finally, use simple and familiar chart and graph designs when possible, such as a pie chart or a bar chart. While complex data visualizations can be visually appealing and attention grabbing, they can also be hard for your audience to understand.

When you use SmartArt in PowerPoint, you need to convert your SmartArt to shapes. SmartArt is not accessible by default, which means that screen readers will not be able to read it in its default format. Once you have created your SmartArt and added all the relevant content, you'll need to convert it to shapes by navigating to SmartArt Design, Convert, and then Convert To Shapes. I'm going to show you how to do this. I'm going to escape my presentation and I am in the current slide, which is the SmartArt slide.

I have a SmartArt image here. And so what I'm going to do is select that. And I am currently on the Slideshow tab. What I want to look for is the SmartArt Design tab in PowerPoint. Go ahead and select that. And then under SmartArt, what you want to look for is the Convert menu item. I'm going to select the Convert menu item, and what I want to do is I have two dropdown items. I want to select Convert To Shapes. And once I convert it to shapes, these are two individual shapes that can now be read by a screen reader.

The last aspect I wanted to cover around SmartArt is alt text. In the scenario of SmartArt, because you have exposed the text in the shape, it's no longer an image. But PowerPoint does not know that. So if you were to run the Accessibility Checker, you would get an alert that this needs alt text. So instead, what you're going to do is mark this as decorative. And you want to do that on the Format tab of PowerPoint, and you want to look for the alt text menu item.

Once you select the alt text menu item, ensure you have marked as decorative the actual SmartArt shape. And in this case, I have marked it as decorative, and that is on, so it will not look for alt text for that content. Now let's go over the Accessibility Checker and saving your PowerPoint. Always run the Accessibility Checker.

While the Accessibility Checker won't catch everything that we covered today, it can catch several accessibility issues you may have missed, including any images that are missing alt text, auto generated alt text that hasn't been updated, missing table headers, warnings about merge cells in your tables, and reading order issues with the slide. The navigation for the Accessibility Checker is the Review tab and then Check Accessibility. Let's go over how to actually run the Accessibility Checker. I'm going to escape out of my slide.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the Review tab. I have kept one issue within this PowerPoint so we have an example. I'm going to go to the Review tab. I'm going to select Check Accessibility under the menu. And when I do that, a pane is going to open on the right and I have some missing alt text. And I will actually move my Zoom window just so you can see the full Accessibility Checker. I'm going to click on that, and actually, it's going to take me to the slide, which is slide 25.

And I can actually add a description right now because it has recommended actions for that slide. So I'm going to go to recommended actions. It's going to open alt text, and now I can enter alt text for this image. Keep in mind that we do have the alt text for this image on this PowerPoint slide because this is an accessibility training. So in this case, I'm going to just put that the alt text is included in the content of this slide.

And then once I do that, the alt text is now there, I'm going to close this, and the Accessibility Checker automatically updates. It says no accessibility issues found. People with disabilities should not have difficulty reading this presentation. I'm going to close the Accessibility Checker and then we're going to go back to the presentation itself and continue on to how to save your PowerPoints. Always remember to update file properties when saving your PowerPoint.

The file properties behind the scenes stores metadata that is read to screen reader users and is also used for website searches. As people tend to use a previous file to create a new file rather than start from scratch with a template each time, when you do not update the file properties, you end up with file properties that do not match the current file. In addition, if you've never added a file name behind the scenes, there will be a blank file name instead. Neither option is a great experience for screen reader users and can impact people finding your content through a website search.

Now I'm going to show you how to update the file properties in PowerPoint. I'm going to escape out of the slide and I'm going to go to the File tab. I'm going to select the Info menu item. And under Info, you want to look for the Properties section. And that's where you're going to find the title property, which is the most critical one to update. If you're creating from a template, the title property is going to be empty.

And what I'm going to do is you want to give a descriptive title for both screen reader users and for website search. And I'm going to enter in provide accessible presentations. And that will actually match the file name I've saved the PowerPoint as. When I did Save As, I saved the PowerPoint as Provide Accessible Presentations. So those two match now. The only other one you want to look at, especially if you're replicating someone else's document, is look for the author field and make sure that content is correct. If it's not, adjust it.

Once you've completed your PowerPoint, you should avoid saving your PowerPoint as a PDF. Unless the content is proprietary, there is no reason to save it as a PDF. Saving it as a PDF will come with additional remediation on the Adobe Acrobat side. In addition, PDFs are not as secure as they appear. Unless a PDF is completely locked down as read only, then it can easily be converted back to a PowerPoint.

And if you completely lock it down, you actually block screen reader users from accessing the content in your presentation, thus defeating the purpose of making the PowerPoint accessible. Before we wrap up this training, I wanted to mention the PowerPoint Accessibility Checklist. We've created a PowerPoint Accessibility Checklist that you can save as a favorite. There is a lot to learn about PowerPoint accessibility, and it can be easy to forget a step.

We've created an interactive checklist you can reference when creating a PowerPoint. It will also include checklist items for when you present the content. You can access the checklist through the LinkedIn Learning course now that you have completed the video portion of this training. Thank you so much for attending this training, and if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to the UITS digital experience team.