Microsoft PowerPoint Document Accessibility Guide

The default slide layouts, such as Title Slide, Title and Content, etc. should be used because they already have an established reading order. Your students who have low vision likely use a screen reader which audibly expresses the contents on each slide in order. For example, a Title and Content slide will read the Title field first, then the Content field. Any additional content, such as images or graphs will be read after that. When selecting a theme for your slides, choose one that is relatively simple with strong foreground and background color contrast.

As your student using a screen reader is browsing your PowerPoint presentation, if your images have no alternative text, such students will have no idea what the image or chart is about. Imagine you have an image of the latest statistics from the NIH website regarding the spread of the Zika virus. Well, if it is an image, and not a creation of the chart within PowerPoint, alternative text stating the aspects of the chart that you want students to note should be written out.

A descriptive hyperlink is a hyperlink that has a text description which tells the user where the link goes. Here are some examples, Cal State Fullerton home page and the Faculty Development Center website. Having the actual URL display is only useful for printed or classroom displayed PowerPoints, such as “http://oet.fullerton.edu”. Some web addresses might be well-known, such as “http://youtube.com”, but others may be more obscure, such as “https://udl-irn.org/udlhe-digicon/”. Also, a student is not going to want to listen to the whole URL being read just to try to figure out where the link goes.

The title for each slide is used as a Table of Contents for the presentation and can be useful in helping the student to find the topic he/she is interested in learning about. Likewise, it is a good practice to not repeat using the same title for multiple slides. Even slides with only a big image or chart displayed should have a title for navigation. The title can be in front of or behind the slide-sized image depending upon how you want it to display.

Tables should be used for tabular data and not for layout of content. To be useable by a screen reader, the table should have a clear structure and a Header row.

The Accessibility Checker within PowerPoint can show you where some issues may be and give you some clues as to how you can fix many types of access issues, including ALT text, table header rows, missing Titles, etc.

Once you upload your PowerPoint file to your course in Canvas, Ally will score it. Clicking on the score may offer you additional accessibility information regarding the issues and how you can fix them. See the Use Accessibility Checkers section of the FDC Accessibility page for more information about using Ally.

Some additional suggestions may include the following:

• Use a larger size sans serif font which has a strong color contrast with the slide background.
• All videos should have captions.
• All audio should have transcriptions.
• Keep the animations simple and provide ALT tags for them.
• Avoid wordiness. Keep the text clear, exact and brief.

Some professors prefer to convert them PowerPoints to PDF when sharing them with students. PDF is likely more usable across platforms (phone, ipads, tablets, Mac, PC, etc. However, converting to PDF may open a whole other can of accessibility worms. Once a PowerPoint has been converted to PDF, it likely will need to be opened in Adobe Acrobat to have those issues fixed. Read the PDF guide to learn about how to fix the most common PDF issues.

Converting to video (MP4) is also an option, especially if you have narration within your PowerPoint. An MP4 video is a good cross-platform choice; however, you should also add captions or transcriptions. The FDC website can help with captioning or transcriptions.