How to Create Accessible PowerPoint Slides on the Web.

At the time of this writing, PowerPoint content can usually be easily made very accessible on the Web to every type of disability group except one: the blind. When multimedia content is included in the presentation, then additional considerations have to be taken into account for the deaf as well, but that goes beyond the scope of this particular document. This document will focus on the task of making accessible text, graphics, charts and graphs within PowerPoint.

Methods of posting PowerPoint content to the Web

In general, there are two ways of posting your PowerPoint slides to the Web. These are:

1. Post the original PowerPoint file without any modifications
2. Post an HTML version of the slides

Each of these methods has its strengths and weaknesses as far as accessibility is concerned, which we will examine below.

Posting the original file

When you post the original file (e.g. myslideshow.ppt) to the Web, the user can view the slides directly from within a browser if the user has the PowerPoint Viewer plug-in installed. Recent editions of Internet Explorer come with this plug-in already installed. The plug-in must be downloaded from Microsoft's Web site for use in Netscape.

If the user does not have the plug-in installed, he or she has the option of saving the PowerPoint file to the hard drive, where it can be opened within the PowerPoint full program if it is installed on the user's computer. If neither the Viewer plug-in nor the full version of PowerPoint is installed on the user's computer, then there is no way for the user to access the content of the file, regardless of the person's disability status.

The PowerPoint Viewer plug-in is, for all intents and purposes, worthless to blind individuals who use screen readers. The only way that a blind person can access the original PowerPoint file is by opening it up in the full version of PowerPoint. This can be a problem if the blind person does not own a copy of the full version of PowerPoint.

Still, posting the original file is the easiest way to publish the content to the Internet, and it gives the most faithful representation of the slide show author's content. There is no reason to discourage posting the original file AS LONG AS an HTML alternative is provided.

See an example of PowerPoint slides posted in their original format.

Posting an HTML version of the slides

    The built-in Web conversion tool

Microsoft has created a rather simple interface for creating Web pages out of your PowerPoint slides. The result is very good . . . as long as you're not blind. The resulting HTML files of the built-in Web conversion utility are definitely not friendly to screen readers. In Netscape, the whole slide is rendered as a single graphic, without any "alt tag" (alternative text version of the image). In Internet Explorer things are a little bit better, because the text is rendered as true text, which can be read by a screen reader. The problem is that the page layout is complicated by an unfriendly and confusing frame layout which is difficult for the unsighted user to decipher. In addition, there are no usable alt tags for the images*.

You may want to use the built-in conversion tool to make the slides accessible to people who don't have the PowerPoint Viewer plug-in nor the full program, but don't count on the built-in tool to make your content accessible to the blind. The tool isn't designed to do that. You'll have to choose another method.

See an example of PowerPoint slides saved as web pages using the built-in tool.

*If you right-click (in Windows) on an image in your PowerPoint document, there is an option to add an alt tag to the image, but, for some reason, Microsoft has coded the resulting HTML in such a way that the alt tag is unavailable to screen readers, and so is of no use.

    Making your own HTML, using the outline

One way to make your slides accessible to the blind is to create an outline in standard HTML. You can copy all of the content in the outline view of PowerPoint into an HTML editor, then format it yourself in the appropriate ways.

If you're careful, this can be the most accurate (and time-consuming) way to make the slides accessible to the blind. But there are some big pitfalls.

Pitfall 1: When you use the text-box tool in PowerPoint, none of the text that you put in the text box shows up in the outline. This means that you will need to retype anything that you put in a text box (or avoid using text boxes).

Pitfall 2: None of the graphics are included in the outline. If the graphics are important to the presentation, you'll have to describe them (in text) in your HTML outline.

Pitfall 3: None of the embedded content is included in the outline (e.g. videos, charts, graphs, sounds, etc.). If any of these are important, you will need to provide a text description of them.

Pitfall 4: Sometimes the outline needs to be reorganized somewhat in order to read logically. For example, it is common to put the same heading on two or more slides in a row. The fact that this same heading is repeated may or may not cause confusion when being listened to by a blind person. Use good judgment in formatting the outline.

The biggest drawback to this method is that it is time-consuming and it requires fairly good knowledge of HTML in order to produce a truly effective document.

See an example of PowerPoint slides made into a single-page outline.

    Using the "Save as accessible HTML" plug-in

This plug-in is still under development, so there is room for improvement, but it is available in its beta stage right now, and does offer some important advantages over the other methods discussed so far. The plug-in can be downloaded at http://www.rehab.uiuc.edu/ppt. You will have to pay VERY CAREFUL attention to the installation instructions, because it is not yet a user-friendly process. The plug-in works only with PowerPoint 2000.

This plug-in will walk you through the steps of adding alternative text to your images, charts, graphs and other non-text elements.

The most exciting feature is that it can take embedded Excel charts and automatically extract the data from them and convert them into an accessible format. This feature is still being refined, but the concept is an important and useful one.

The end result of this process produces something similar to the Microsoft built-in HTML conversion tool, except that there is an additional text-only version which is more accessible to screen readers. There are still some pitfalls:

Pitfall 1: Although the text in PowerPoint text boxes does get exported to the Web page, it does not always get placed in the correct position on the page. The best rule of thumb here is to avoid using text boxes if at all possible.

Pitfall 2: This tool cannot automatically create captions for videos or other multimedia content.

Despite the pitfalls, the difficult installation, and the unfinished state of the plug-in, this option holds the most promise, and should be investigated by regular users of PowerPoint documents on the Web.

See an example of PowerPoint slides saved as "accessible HTML".

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