Making Power Point Accessible

Microsoft Power Point is one of the most popular tools for creating slide show

presentations. It is often used to organize thoughts for a meeting or lesson, to

present key points in a live presentation, and even to create handouts. This

article outlines how to can make PowerPoint files more accessible on the web.

Create Accessible Power Point Files

Whether you link directly to a Power Point file (PPT), or display your presentation

export the presentation as an accessible PDF file. Because of these accessibility

limitations, this article does not include guidelines for Office for Mac users.

Slide layouts

Every version of Power Point since at least 2000 contains a series of highly

accessible slide layouts. Power Point is designed to encourage the use of these

slide layouts, especially in newer versions. Using these templates correctly will

ensure that your files have correctly structured headings and lists, proper reading

order, etc. The correct use of slide layouts is probably the most significant thing

you can do to ensure that your content is accessible.

Alternative text for images

Power Point presentations usually include images. While these images are

sometimes decorative, many contain content that should be given a text

alternative. Images can be give appropriate alterative text in Power Point. This

alternative text will be read by a screen reader in a Power Point file and should

remain intact when exporting to HTML or PDF.

• "Word art" is actually converted to an image in Office 2003-2007 and must

be given alternative text. It remains text in Office 2010.

• Embedded charts should be given alternative text, but sometimes the

content of the chart might be too long for alternative text. If your

presentation contains numerous charts or graphs, consider including a link

to the original PPT file. The data that is used to create the chart will be

accessible in the original file (it is basically a simple spreadsheet), but will

not be included in a PDF or HTML version.

A dialog box will appear. Select the Alt Text tab. You will notice that the image

filename is entered into the field by default. The filename is never appropriate

alternative text. This functionality will almost certainly result in misuse of the alt

attribute.

Replace the filename with appropriate alternative text. For this image, it would be

alternative text to an image, select Format Picture.

With the Format Picture menu open, select the option for Alt Text in the sidebar.

Two fields will appear, one labeled Title and one labeled Description. For best

results, add appropriate alternative text to the Description field, not the Title field.

Information in the Title field will not be saved as alternative text when the file is

saved as HTML.

identified by a screen reader. If your presentation contains more than the

simplest tables, and if you have Adobe Acrobat, consider saving your

presentation to PDF and adding the additional accessibility information in Acrobat

Pro.

Hyperlinks are usually created in PowerPoint by pasting the full URL into a page

(e.g., http://webaim.org/techniques/powerpoint/) and hitting space, Enter, or

some other key. This automatically creates a link. It is simple, but the URL may

not make sense to the reader. To change the link text, select a link, right click

printout, you may want to include the URL and a description in the link text -

"WebAIM article on accessible PowerPoint

(webaim.org/techniques/powerpoint/)."

Other principles

• Ensure that font size is sufficient. If your presentation will be viewed on a

projector, font size may need to be even larger.

• Provide sufficient contrast. If your presentation will be viewed on a

projector, sometimes the contrast needs to be even more pronounced.

• Do not use color as the only way to convey content.

• If you have embedded video, ensure that the video is captioned, and that

the player controls are accessible.

• If you have embedded audio, ensure a transcript is included.

• If your slides contain animations, ensure that they are brief and do not

distract from the most important content on the page.

Outline and Notes Panels

PowerPoint contains two panels that can sometimes be used to enhance

accessibility: the outline panel and the notes panel.

The outline panel contains a text outline of the content that appears in your

sequenced, that slide titles are unique and meaningful and that reading order is

especially if the presentation is saved to PDF or some other format.

Source: http://webaim.org/techniques/powerpoint/