Check Accessibility

Check Accessibility is a built-in acccessibility checker in PowerPoint. It gives you an overview of potential accessibility issues on your slides. It is a great tool to help you identify most potential issues. However, it is not perfect. For example, it may flag some issues that are not inaccessible. Therefore, you should always double-check the flagged issues and make sure they are actually accessibile.

1. Launch the accessibility checker.

To launch the accessibility checker: select Review → Check Accessibility.

This is a menu bar on Microsoft PowerPoint. It shows that "Review" panel is selected. "Check Accessibility" button is selected.

2. Check the accessibility panel.

You can check the accessibility panel on the right after clicking the button. Now you can see there are so many errors on our slide.

This is a screenshot of the "Check Accessibility" side bar. The title on the bar is "Accessibility"; the subtitle is "Inspection Results". There are three major types of information "Error", "Warnings", and "Tips". Under "Errors", there are two types of errors including "Missing alternative text (179)" and "Table has no header row (3)". Under warnings, there are three types of information "Use captions for audio and video (1)", "Hard-to-read text contrast (4), and "Check reading order (25)

3. Check the details of each error and warnings.

When you click into an error, PowerPoint gives you recommendations on how to fix these issues. For example below, “Group 5” is missing alternative text. It turns out that we didn’t add alt text to the “Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering” logo, which is an image.

Screenshot of the PowerPoint interface with a slide on the left, titled 'Finding Similar Items: Locality Sensitive Hashing'. The subtitle reads 'CASE547 ML for Big Data Tim Althoff'. The slide also includes the Paul G Allen School of Computer Science logo. On the right, the Accessibility Panel is open, showing detailed information for each 'missing alternative text' error for elements on the current slide.