Designing Accessible Web Pages

Making PowerPoint Slides Accessible On A Web-Page

Many times, for a classroom course, the instructor will publish the PowerPoint slides that were shown in class onto the Web, using PowerPoint's facilities to do so. Unfortunately when PowerPoint does this, it encodes the slides as images. So the end-result would be an inaccessible web-page. A measure of accessibility can be brought about, if the following procedure is followed.

1. Open the PowerPoint file so that it looks like below:

2. Our area of interest is the window to the left (marked with a red circle) which represents a sort of outline of the presentation. Click with your mouse in the space on the left. On the keyboard press 'Ctrl+A', which selects all the text in the left-hand window.

It should appear as below:

3. Press 'Ctrl+C' to copy all that information. This information represents the written material (or text) on the slides. Press 'Ctrl+V' to paste this information onto a new page in FrontPage.

It should look like below:

4. If the text in your PowerPoint slide is the color 'white' then you might not see anything on the new FrontPage page you've made. In the FrontPage 'Edit' window, 'Select All', this will highlight the page, then choose 'Font' from the 'Format' menu to select the appropriate color to change the text's color.

The text on the new page you create will be formatted the same way that it was on the PowerPoint slide. Since this might look a bit unseemly on a web-page, make sure that you review and, if necessary, edit the page for better layout.

NOTE: Any images and charts you may have on the PowerPoint slides will not be transferred in this procedure. You will have to insert any images or charts onto the new page. REMEMBER to tag the images!

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