A word on PowerPoint's accessibility shortcomings
When compared to other Microsoft Office applications, PowerPoint's accessibility tools and features fall a little short. While the platform offers the basic tools you'll need to ensure slides and text can be parsed, it lacks key features like styles or even support for headings.
In other words, you cannot manually mark text as a heading, or divide complex slides into sections efficiently. This can make it difficult for users relying on assistive tools to understand the relationship of your content.
Whether a presentation is accessible or not is heavily dependant on that presentation's contents, layout, and design. Given the platform's limitations, not all designs can be made accessible. If slides are kept simple and linear, then it's possible to create a presentation that can be parsed and understood by users relying on assistive technologies. Calling PowerPoint an accessible platform is a bit of a stretch, though.
Whether that should deter you from using PowerPoint is entirely dependant on the type and the complexity of the information you want to disseminate. When it comes to accessibility, text will always trump over designs and visuals.
Start by enabling the accessibility tab
Before we can do any accessibility work we need to enable the Accessibility tab, which PowerPoint does not display by default. Navigate to the Review tab and press the Check Accessibility button to toggle it on.
The tab will need to be toggled back on every time the application is launched You can also add it to the ribbon menu which can be done by right-clicking the menu and selecting Customize the ribbon. The Accessibility option is found in the Tools tab section, and can be moved to the Main tab.
Accessible design
Since PowerPoint lacks robust structuring tools, it's best to keep slide designs simple and linear. Using more slides with less content is preferable to cramming too much information onto a single, content-heavy slide.
As a general rule, focus on presenting a single concept or topic per slide. Use title text for added clarity and opt for designs that are less cluttered but rich in contextual information.
Reading order
When assistive tools like screen readers move through a slide, they follow a pre-set order that is specified in the presentation. It's critical that this reading order is reviewed, and that decorative elements are removed.
You can open the Reading Order pane from the ribbon menu's Accessibility tab. In the pane, drag items in the correct order or use the arrow buttons to move parts around.
Note that if you've used the reading order tool in previous versions of PowerPoint, the order was once bottom-to-top but is now inverted. This has been changed over the years and is now, thankfully, numbered to prevent any confusion.
Quick tip
You can validate the reading order by sequentially moving through individual elements using the Tab and ensuring the focus order aligns with the visual design.
Smart Art
Smart Art is a great way to quickly illustrate complex ideas and charts. However, Smart Art components are treated as a single figure by screen readers. In other words, PowerPoint displays them like it would an image or a chart: only the alternative text value is provided to screen readers, rather than the component's contents and text.
Because of this, I recommend against the use of Smart Art unless you can either easily resume their contents as alternative text or are willing to compose a text version. The only alternative I've found is to generate a Smart Art as a reference piece and to design a "non smart" version using shapes.
Have clear link destinations
When adding links in PowerPoint presentations, add them to text that explains their destination. Avoid using generic, non-descriptive text like "click here" or "at the following address." Instead, use actions like "Consult our inventory" or self-descriptive text like "yearly earnings report."
Additionally, avoid providing the full URL in text format as long strings of URL text aren't particularly fun to go through with a screen reader.
Add alternative text
Visual components like images and charts must contain a text description, commonly referred to as alternative text. Images and shapes that are used for decorative purposes should be marked as such.
To mark an element as decorative, right-click the element and select "View Alt Text" from the pop-up menu. In the panel, select "Mark as decorative." Alternatively, components can be marked as decorative in the Reading Order pane by checking them off the list.
Managing languages and dialects
In a multilingual environment or when multiple people have edited the same file, you may find that some elements are marked in the wrong language. Using the wrong language can cause garbled speech when parsed with a screen reader but be remediated by overwriting the proofing language.
- Navigate to the View tab and select the Outline View.
- In the navigation pane that opens, press Ctrl+A to select all elements.
- Navigate to the Review tab and select Proofing language.
- Select the appropriate language from the list.
This will overwrite the language of every selected element. You can also set the language of individual elements should they be in a different language that the rest of the content.
Slide titles
Every slide must have a text box that is also used as the slide's title. Additionally, each title in the presentation must be unique and descriptive of the slide's contents.
To set a text box as the slide's title, select the box and, in the Accessibility tab, press the Slide Title button. To view all titles, navigate to the View tab and select Outline View.
In some cases, your slide may not have the room for a title or it might not suit the design. In that case, you can set a hidden title in the Slide Title button of the Accessibility tab.
Note that if you've previously set a title for the slide, the invisible slide title option may be unavailable. Should that be the case, you can create a text box and move it outside the slide's frame. This is essentially what the Hidden Slide Title feature does.
The accessibility checker
The Accessibility Checker is a built-in tool that automatically scans your presentation for potential accessibility issues and offers useful recommendations on how to fix them.
You can find the checker in the Review tab by selecting Check Accessibility. It also runs in the background by default and notifies you in the status bar if it detects any issues.
Final thoughts
If nothing else, what I hope you take away from this guide is just how important it is to design your presentations with accessibility in mind from the start; it's exponentially more difficult, frustrating, and time consuming to remediate an inaccessible presentation than it would have been to do it right from the start.
By using simple slide layouts, ensuring a clear reading order, and by providing descriptive titles and alternative text for visual elements, your presentations can be made much more accessible to a wider audience, including those relying on assistive technologies.