PowerPoint Accessibility

How to Make PowerPoint Slides Accessible?

First, why PowerPoint?

It has easy ways to check and add accessibility features. For example, Check Accessibility and Selection/Reading Order are the two primary reasons that make PowerPoint accessible. To make accessible slides, you don’t need to discard your old slides. Instead, you can simply change or add some features.

Check Accessibility

Check Accessibility is a feature that can flag several potential issues in your lecture slides. Not all flagged issues are 100% inaccessible (e.g., you might disagree with an issue about the reading order), but they are mostly accurate. Not all issues are caught by the automatic checker, and you will need to check for some accessibility issues (e.g., color contrast) manually.

Check Reading Order

Selection/Reading Order impacts how a screen reader user reads your slide when reviewing it. Correct selection/reading order ensures that the screen reader will follow your presentation order. Imagine that’s the order that you’re going to present your slides. If inaccurate, the reading order will confuse the screen readers. For example, for complex slides with multiple text boxes, make sure the conclusion doesn’t appear first or the caption doesn’t follow the wrong graphic.

Add Alternative Text (alt text)

Missing alt text visuals is another common barrier. Make sure you add alt text to any important graphics and animations.

In this section, we will cover how to resolve these common challenges and include other tricks in PowerPoint.