Your slides

You need to follow accessibility best practice when putting your slides together. This includes things like:

• having enough colour contrast
• adding alt text
• using large text
• having speaker notes or a transcript available

Note: Any image sources should always be cited to adhere to copyright legislation.

• Use built-in slide themes and templates

  Like most Microsoft products, PowerPoint has several in-built features to improve accessibility, including ready-made presentation templates built with accessible features. However, in line with University Brand Guidelines the corporate PowerPoint slide deck should be used for all presentations.

  Built-in templates (such as the University's corporate slide deck) also have the reading order configured correctly. This means screen readers can read the content of slides in the correct order.

  Setting a reading order is vital for people using assistive technology like screen readers or braille display. You don't want the user to start reading the bullet points, then go to the image and then read the title last.

• How to check the reading order

  To check or change the reading order of your slide:

  1. Switch to the Home tab, click 'Arrange' and choose 'Selection Pane'.
  2. The selection pane lists all the objects in the slide. Objects will be read aloud, beginning with the last item and ending with the top list item.
  3. You can correct any items that are in the wrong place by dragging items into the correct order.

  How to use the reading order pane (Microsoft Support)

• Use helpful slide titles

  Titles are useful for establishing the contents of the slide. There may be situations where people need to scan through the presentation quickly to find a specific slide. This is where accurate slide titles are helpful.

  Titles are essential for screen reader users to navigate the slides and find the information they need and using relevant, unique titles benefits everyone.

  If you can't fit all the information you want on one slide, don't make the mistake of skipping a title altogether. Try to avoid the same title for slides with information that carriers over. Instead, try using "[Slide Title] part 1" and [Slide Title] part 2" to help your users orientate themselves.

• Check your colour contrast

  Even if you're using a template to design your presentation, you need to check the colours you are using. A major issue for people, for many reasons, is the use of text on top of images. Any text should be on a clear part of the image or else a solid-coloured background, for example a shape needs to be between the image and the text.

  Choose a colour combination for your background and text that have good contrast. The contrast between the background and text must be 4.5:1 for small or medium-sized text to be accessible.

  Tools like the WebAIM Colour Contrast Checker are useful for testing your colour combinations against accessibility standards.

• Make fonts readable

  If you are delivering your presentation to a large crowd, think of the people in the back row.

  The minimum font size for a PowerPoint presentation should be 32 point. This improves readability for all users, but especially those with low vision.

• Add alt text to images

  Alt text gives a written description of an image, so that screen reader users can understand them. This also includes charts, shapes, graphs and infographics.

  A helpful PowerPoint function is the automatic alt text generator. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically generate a description for each image. While these descriptions are a helpful starting point, they are not always accurate. Sometimes they are wrong. Other times, you may find they do not include enough detail to convey the same information.

  Logos are a perfect example of when AI-generated alt text needs manual editing. This is why adding your own written description is very important.

  In general, it's best to avoid text in images, but if you really need to, this text either needs to be written in the alt text or elsewhere within the slide.

  How to add alternative text to a shape, picture or chart in PowerPoint (Microsoft Support)

• Set tables up properly

  Tables are often overlooked when it comes to accessibility, but it's important that tables are formatted so that assistive technology users can read them.

  PowerPoint lets you identify a single row of column headers and a single column of row headers.

  To identify table headers in PowerPoint:

  1. Click inside the table and the table tools option should appear.
  2. If the top row of the table contains headers for each column (which they usually do), make sure the 'header row' box is ticked.
  3. If the first column contains headers for each row, then tick the 'first column' box.

  PowerPoint also has various table themes and styles to help the table headers stand out. This is another way of ensuring that tables are formatted correctly. Some screen readers will not identify headers in PowerPoint, but we still recommend taking these steps.

  Making your header stand out can help users with low vision to focus.

  Identifying table headers also makes things easier if you want to convert your presentation into another format like a PDF.

  How to make your tables in PowerPoint more accessible (WebAIM)

• Add relevant text to links

  Links are a good way of directing people to more resources, but URLs or web addresses alone are not particularly accessible.

  You should always avoid copying and pasting a URL straight into your presentation. This is because most URLs do not clearly indicate where the link lead to. Most URLs contain a combination of letters, number, ampersands, dashes and other characters. These are tedious when read out loud by a screen reader.

  Remember: blind users cannot visually skim through long links; they must listen to the whole text.

• Add closed captions to your videos

  If your presentation contains any video or audio content, these must be accessible.

  Adding closed captions to your video content makes it accessible to a larger audience. This includes people with hearing loss or a learning impairment. Captions also help people with autism, ADD/ADHD and learning difficulties. They also make things easier for non-native English speakers.

  The University's Guidelines on Captioning recommends the use of Panopto software to create captions and transcripts. Contact Kenny McCartan if you do not have access to Panopto or if you require assistance.

• Use the Microsoft accessibility checker

  Like other Microsoft products, PowerPoint has an accessibility checker that allows you to check for issues.

  The accessibility checker is useful for picking up any issues you might have missed. the checker identifies errors and gives you tips on fixing any issues that arise.

  Issues it can pick up include missing alt text, unclear link text and duplicate slide titles. It also gives prompts like encouraging you to check the slide reading order.

  The accessibility checker can be used on both Windows and Mac versions of PowerPoint.

• Make your presentation available in other formats

  While PowerPoint is great for live presentations, it's not the best format for sharing content afterwards. File sizes can be large and often require the user to have Microsoft Office installed.

  Before sharing your PowerPoint presentation, ask your, "Is this the best format for everyone?"

  Making your presentation available in other formats like a Word document, PDF or HTML web page gives people choice. It means they can choose the format that works best for them.

  You can convert your presentation from PowerPoint to PDF when you save your slides. This will keep the accessible formatting added in before. Although, it's worth checking the accessibility of these documents as well, though.

  Making your presentation accessible is not just the right thing to do. It increases the number of people who can understand and enjoy your content.