POWERPOINT presents fundamantal obstacles, particularly to people with visual disabilities, mainly because not all screen readers can interpret POWERPOINT files. These obstacles are best overcome by proving an accessible alternative in HTML.

POWERPOINT files can also be enormous, and therefore very slow to download, but they can be optimised for the web.

Some of these tips may sound familiar, because there are fundamental accessibility principles that apply to making any document accessible, including POWERPOINT.

CREATE AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE POWERPOINT FILE:

This alternative can be:

• An accessible HTML version of the file
• The name and phone number of someone who can provide help or a hard copy - this may not be a practical option for teaching materials

Creating HTML Alternatives :

• Use the University of Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard for Microsoft Office - some examples of the output of this wizard
• Creating your own HTML using the 'Outline' (has some pitfalls)
• Note: Using the 'Save as web page' option in Powerpoint will create a file that has issues for some users

If you wish to use POWERPOINT, prepare your file:

• Include the file name, format, size and number of pages as part of the link to the file.
• Do not rely on colour alone to convey information - also use text, shapes (W3C Techniques for conveying information)
• Choose high contrast colours for text on background (Download and test the contrast of colours (tool from the National Information Library Service) - aim for the maximum, or test by changing your monitor display to black and white, or print your page on a black and white printer)
• Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (W3C Techniques for text equivalents), and update the text equivalent whenever the non-text object changes (WCAG Checkpoint 1.1)
• Use clear language and a logical reading order (W3C Techniques for clear pages WCAG Checkpoint 14)
• Make each page title unique - so that these become sensible link text if the file is converted to HTML in POWERPOINT

Powerpoint presentations accessible to screen readers may be saved as HTML in Office 2000, but this HTML should be cleaned of Microsoft code first. Alternatively, convert the file to PDF, but PDF may not be 'accessible' unless it is fully tagged.

Refer to:

• How to Create Accessible Powerpoint Presentations for the Web: from WebAIM