In this video, I'm going to introduce you to creating
accessible Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.
As we have seen before with accessible Microsoft Word documents and PDF files,
it is important to add appropriate structure to your content.
Since PowerPoint slides often include heavy use of images and color,
we'll also revisit how to add alt text to images and how to use color effectively.
As a note to Mac users,
PowerPoint for Mac does not allow
assistive technology to access the content of the slides,
we recommend that you avoid using
PowerPoint from Mac when trying to create accessible slides.
In order for assistive technology to convey
the content of your PowerPoint slides to a student,
the slide needs to contain a specific type of structure.
This structure is provided through the use of slide layouts,
slide layout of the pre-formatted slides structures provided by PowerPoint.
Within PowerPoint, you can find
a collection of slide layouts by selecting Home and New Slide.
Here you'll find different pre-formatted slide structures to choose from,
including slides with title,
content and header boxes.
PowerPoint automatically starts a new presentation with
a title slide containing a title and subtitle box.
Now I'm going to use
PowerPoint's Outline View to help you understand how to use slide layouts,
and to provide a way to check that your slide content is accessible.
Let's look at an example of PowerPoint presentation that contains some content.
This presentation has a title slide and a slide with some text and a graph.
Before I add more contents,
I'm going to turn on outline view.
If I go to view and select outline,
I am now able to see a list of the content on my slides to the left.
The content shown in this outline view is
accessible to assistive devices like screen readers.
Let's add another slide using slide layouts.
I'm going to select the slide layout that has a heading and one content box.
As I type my content into the new slide,
you can see this information appearing in the outline view.
When you add text directly into the title,
content or header boxes provided by the slide layout,
text information becomes accessible to assistive devices.
For those of you familiar with styles and Microsoft Word documents or tags and PDF files,
you can think of slide layouts as pre-styled or pretext slide templates.
If you create a new text box on the slide,
this content is not accessible.
Notice how the new content I created does not appear in the outline.
Remember, the most efficient option to making your content
accessible is to use or modify existing content boxes in the slide layout.
Here I am adding the new content into the existing slide layout content box.
I can also change the slide layout and adapt this to meet my needs.
If your content requires a layout that is not provided through
slide layouts or from a modification of the existing slide layouts,
you'll need to make a new slide layout under the slide master view.
To do this, select view,
slide master view and then insert slide master.
Let's take a closer look at slide two.
This slide contains a graph.
I use this slide layout when I created this slide,
but I noticed that the graph doesn't appear in the outline view.
Images, graphs and tables do not appear in the outline view.
For any images you use to convey content in a PowerPoint slide,
you'll need to add alt text that describes the relevant information.
Let's add alt text to this graph.
Right click on the image,
select format chart area,
then layout and properties,
ensure the alt text enter the description fields not the title fields.
Note that alt text does not display in the outline view,
but you can use the accessibility checker to double
check that all of your images and graphs have all texts.
To use the accessibility checker,
go to file, check for issues and then check accessibility.