PowerPoint Best Practices and Conversion Techniques

Ken Petri

Director, OSU Web Accessibility Center (WAC)

How Accessible is PowerPoint?

For a screen reader user
- JAWS and Window-Eyes only, IBM Home Page Reader cannot read PowerPoint
- Keystroke commands in JAWS are usable with practice but not intuitive and roadmarks are few
For low vision user
- PowerPoint scales in size very well
For mobility impaired user
- Simple keystrokes for running a presentation
Web-based alternatives are more accessible
- Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard for Office (www.accessiblewizards.uiuc.edu $39.95)
- LecShare Pro (www.lecshare.com $69)
- Eric Meyer's s5 (www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ Free!)

Tips for PowerPoint Authoring #1

Use the Slide Layout pane for creating new slides
- Format → Slide Layout...

Tips for PowerPoint Authoring #2

Use Notes pane for elaborations of graphics (diagrams, charts)

Tips for PowerPoint Authoring #3

Use Outline pane to visually check screen reader accessibility of text. Text is missing? Then no content in pre-2003 PowerPoint with pre-version 7 JAWS

Tips for PowerPoint Authoring #4

Watch out for cluttered pages and poor background-foreground contrast and provide "alternative text" for non-decorative images, none for decorative images
- Right-click image → Format Picture → Web tab
  
  Above we see some bad alternative text description applied to a decorative image on a slide with poor contrast.

Tips for PowerPoint Authoring #5

Embedded movies should be captioned
(LecShare Pro can help caption a PowerPoint, using the lecture notes pane as content for progressive captions embedded in a QuickTime movie)

PowerPoint in Carmen

Screen readers work unreliably or not at all with web-page embedded PowerPoint
PowerPoint exported properly to accessible/tagged PDF (using PDFMaker) can be read slightly more reliably within the browser window, but Notes are not preserved in conversion to PDF
Web-based PowerPoint alternatives (s5, Web Publishing Wizard, or LecShare Pro) work very well in Carmen.

HTML-based Presentations in Carmen

Zip compress all of the files
- For s5, zip the presentation HTML file, the "ui" file containing the styles and JavaScript for s5, and any supporting image files you might have in your presentation
- For LecShare Pro, export HTML files using zip option
- For the Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard, upon exporting from PowerPoint, choose the "Save to ZIP file" option

You can find information on using Eric Meyer's s5 on his web site at http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/. LecShare Pro is a stand-alone program that imports your PowerPoint and allows you to add audio. It will sync PowerPoint lecture notes with the slides and display those notes as progressive captions within QuickTime. The Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard is a plugin for Microsoft Office. It adds a "Save as Accessible Web Page..." menu option on the File menu in PowerPoint, Word, and Excel.

PowerPoint file menu with wizard plugin save as accessible web page selected

Find more information about the wizard at http://www.accessiblewizards.uiuc.edu.

HTML-based Presentations (continued)

Edit Course and select Files
Upload and then unzip the file
In Content, Add Topic to a Module, choose Course File as the type of new topic, and browse to the presentation's "index.html" file

OSU Web Accessibility Center/October, 2006