Slide Presentations

When building a slide deck, you should start with your master slides (or Theme Builder in Google Slides). This slide deck runs in the background of the program and is already populated with all of the formatting. This helps you make sure that your slides are consistent in style. Additionally, when you are crafting the master slides, you will put placeholders in for text, titles, objects, and elements. This helps signify to a screen reader what part of the slide is being read. If you simply format your text to look like a title vs putting in a title placeholder, a screen reader does not know that the text is meant to be the slide’s title. You should be using the layouts that are built into the slide master vs. making a layout on a blank slide.

Note: There are more placeholder abilities in PowerPoint than in Google Slides. This is something you need to be cognizant of as you won’t be able to adjust the reading order in Google Slides without an addon such as Grackle.

Because slides are visual, there is often a high temptation to over-embellish the appearance of the slide. While your slides do not have to be sterile (white background with black font), there are some things you need to consider including font selection and contrast.

Slide Titles: Slide titles provide a user with clear navigation throughout the document. When you’re creating slide titles it’s imperative that your titles are succinct, clear, and to the point. You should never replicate slide titles (e.g., we can’t have two slides titled “Slide Titles” in this slide deck). If you need to use the same title (e.g., the continuation of an example), you should number the slide titles (e.g., Slide Title 1 of 3) to make it clear which slide is which. The reason for avoiding duplicate slide titles is someone who is using a screen reader to review a slide deck cannot differentiate which slide is which if all of the slides have identical titles.
7x7 Rule: The 7x7 rule prevents you from putting too much information on a slide. A slide should be brief, plain and concise. It should never be a paragraph (or wall of text). The idea is that your viewer will be able to quickly glance at your slide and gain all of the information. Each slide should have no more than seven lines and each line should have no more than seven words per line.

You should not be looking to read your entire slide for a presentation. The slide is meant to reinforce and guide your presentation and not be a verbatim copy of your lecture.

Creating your presentation slides with too much text can be overwhelming. Writing what you are going to say word for word will not have the intended effect on comprehension.
Instead, the audience’s auditory and visual processing channels will be competing as individuals try to read (visual) what is on the slide while also attempting to listen (auditory) to your narration.
Each channel has a limited working memory capacity. This is known as the dual channel theory.
It is best practice to use the 7x7 rule (maximum of 7 bullets with 7 words per bullet per slide) and expanding on the visual text via your narration for each slide. The audience will be more engaged during your presentation if they need to listen to gain more knowledge than is already available on each slide.

Alternative Text: Alternative or alt text provides a text equivalent of an image so people who are unable to see the image have access to the message it is intended convey. Alternative text is required for any image that is not decorative that is required for context and understanding of the subject material. It should also be added for any tables. Your alternative text should not include phrases such as “image of” or “picture of” as the screen reader will identify that it is reading the alternative text of an image, so this information is simply repetitive. If there is any text on an image, it must also be included in the alternative text. Finally, if an image has a caption the alternative text must not match the image caption.

If your image is decorative in nature you need to mark it as decorative (in MS PowerPoint there is a box to check and in Slides you label it as decorative).

Slide Animations: Slide animations can be distracting at best and inaccessible at worst (and potentially cause seizures in catastrophic scenarios). Slide transition animations often distract individuals who are typically abled. For students with various learning differences, the animations may cause them to lose focus or have difficulty navigating the slide deck. Additionally, the user should always be in control of advancing the slides. Slides should never automatically progress.

Resources

7x7 Slide Example (Google Slides)
Animations (Pearson)
Image Description Guidelines (Diagram Center)
Informative Images (W3C)
Make Slides Easier to Read by Using the Reading Order Pane (Microsoft)
Mysteries of Accessibility: Using Color and Composing Alt Text (Hawkes Learning YouTube)
Mysteries of Accessibility: Designing Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides (Hawkes Learning YouTube)
Other Accessibility Principles (WebAIM)
Slide Reading Order (WebAIM)

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Slide Presentations

Resources

Resources: MS PowerPoint

Resources: Google Slides

Resources: Grackle (Google Slides)