Powerpoint - Accessibility Considerations
The AT Project staff have been working diligently to make lots of resources to share on various platforms. We want to ensure that the documents are as accessible as possible. PowerPoint, a widely-used presentation software, is relatively accessibility friendly. PowerPoint offers a range of features that can enhance the effectiveness of your slides. It's important to us to ensure that our presentations and other written materials are accessible to everyone.
It is also important for teachers to make their materials accessible for their students as well! Creating accessible materials is not just an ethical obligation but also a legal requirement. Moreover, by making your materials accessible, you're ensuring that your message reaches a broader audience, including students with visual or hearing impairments, cognitive challenges, and/or mobility limitations. Everyone deserves an equal opportunity to engage with and benefit from the information you share. Let’s explore the concept of accessibility in PowerPoint materials and highlight the easy, built-in accessibility check tool to create inclusive content!
Microsoft PowerPoint provides a powerful built-in feature called the Accessibility Checker, which helps identify potential accessibility issues in your presentations. Let's explore how you can use this tool to create inclusive content:
Ensuring Proper Slide Structure: The Accessibility Checker evaluates the structure of your slides, ensuring that they are organized logically. It identifies missing titles, headers, and slide layouts, enabling users who rely on screen readers to navigate your presentation more efficiently.
Textual Accessibility: The tool examines the text on your slides and identifies potential problems, such as insufficient color contrast between text and background or small font sizes. Addressing these issues enhances readability and ensures that individuals with visual impairments can access the information effectively.
Image Accessibility: Images are not accessible to all individuals with disabilities and alternative text (alt text) is an important accessibility tool. While PowerPoint gives automatic alternative text for some images, those automatic texts are not quite useful at this point in time. The Accessibility Checker will alert you to images without an alternative text as well as prompt you to check the automatic text descriptions. All images with any content should have alt text and any purely decorative images can be marked as such.
Multimedia and Captions: PowerPoint allows you to include multimedia elements like videos and audio clips. The Accessibility Checker helps verify that you've added closed captions or transcripts for multimedia content, ensuring that individuals with hearing impairments can fully access your presentation.
Inclusivity should be a primary consideration when creating PowerPoint presentations. By utilizing the Accessibility Checker tool, you can easily identify and address potential accessibility issues, making your content more inclusive and reaching a wider audience. By ensuring proper slide structure, incorporating descriptive text, providing captions for multimedia, and maintaining color contrast, you're taking significant steps toward creating accessible presentations that empower and engage everyone.
Remember, accessibility is not a one-time effort but an ongoing commitment to making information universally accessible. By adopting these practices and staying informed about accessibility guidelines, you can contribute to a more inclusive and equitable world, where information is available to all.
So, let's embrace accessibility and harness the power of PowerPoint to create impactful materials that leave a lasting impression on everybody!
