Slideshows

Introduction

Microsoft PowerPoint is a great way to present material to a range of groups from a class, through a form to an entire assembly or conference. It enables you to incorporate so many features which can make for an entertaining and informative presentation. However, while such features as charts, animations, multimedia and autoshapes can be great ways of getting your message across, the way you put those things together can either include or exclude audience members whatever their needs.

Because of the complexity of PowerPoint, there is no one solution which will make your presentation entirely accessible to all. There are things you can do which will help; but they’re chiefly about making the most of your PowerPoint presentation rather than about specific access issues.

Preparation

As with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint has design features built in, which help give a uniform appearance to your presentation. They can also help increase the accessibility of your material.

Choosing Font and Colour

As with the overview, getting these two attributes right can significantly enhance or detract from the accessibility of a document. Your font needs to be sans-seraph because this shows up much more clearly (particularly on a projector screen) and large enough to be easily viewed from a distance. The American Foundation for the Blind recommends a minimum point size of 24 and a maximum of 48.

Colour is more complex, as according to Lighthouse International, a century-old research, advocacy and service organisation based in the US, it’s the ability to discriminate between colours which causes the challenge rather than the colours themselves. Basically though, the sharper the contrast between foreground and background, the more likely your work will be clear to all your students. Read their short article on efective Contrast for further information.

Slide Titles

Label every slide using the title placeholders in the auto-layouts. This not only helps you to orient yourself within the presentation, it will help a search engine pick up your work if it ends up on your school intranet or inter-school network. It will also help you to create a short text document to accompany your presentation. This can be given to blind students and will be discussed later. If for some reason you wish to hide the title of a slide, use the drawing toolbar to hide it beneath an object on the slide, rather than leaving it out completely. It will still show up in the outline view when you wish to see the contents of your slide.

Auto Layout

Microsoft provides one for most every kind of slide you might wish to present, so use them. You might wish to look through the designs and plan out which layout will be best for each of your slides. If you change your mind about the layout you need for a given slide, do not attempt to adapt the original layout as this will result in difficulty getting your design to perform the way you want it. Columns may not line up, spaces may be unequal and fonts may be inconsistent, involving extra time and effort on your part. Just select another layout. You can check the result using outline view.

Animations

think carefully about how you employ these. Do they enhance what you’re trying to say, or do they simply look cool? How might you describe your animations and their purpose in the accompanying text document?

Multimedia

Sound and/or streaming video can enhance your presentation, so long as they are of good quality. Fuzzy video or sound can be a turn-off for any audience member, whether they are vision impaired on not.

Charts and Tables:

you can insert these using the “insert menu” or via a slide layout containing the attributes you want. You can also import tables from Microsoft Word or charts from Microsof Excel. The key thing to remember is to label all rows, colums and objects.

Using Notes

The notes pane can be accessed at the bottom of your screen. Notes are useful both for you as the author of the presentation and for your audience. Along with slide titles, they can help guide you through your presentation, and they can be used to help you create the accompanying text document.

Have you ever been bored or frustrated at a conference because you couldn’t see a presentation clearly enough, particularly if that presentation was something in which you were really interested? Notes can help you prevent that from happening to your audience. They can remind you to draw out the material on the screen to ensure that it is clear to your entire audience. More about this in the notes on presenting.

Slide Transition

Auto-Advance

This is the one exception to the automated design rule. Microsoft provides for the ability to time your slides and auto-advance to the next one. This is extremely useful when timing your presentation while practicing, but it can be restricting once you’re up in front of your class. If you allow yourself the freedom of manually advancing the slide show, you can gage class reaction on the fly, emphasise and de-emphasise points accordingly and give your blind and vision impaired students more time to absorb valueable information.

Transition Sounds

Microsoft also provides for a small sound to be played each time a slide is advanced. Some of these sounds can be a bit quirky, but there are some unobtrusive clicks which you might consider using. You can even search out your own sounds to use if you wish.

During your presentation, a blind or vision impaired audience member will have their hands full, focusing on you as well as the material you provide whether via the screen in front of them, the voice in their ear reading your descriptive notes or through their fingers on a braille display or note taker. An unobtrusive click will simply tell them that their attention should now switch to the next slide.

The Presentation

Now that all your elements are in place and you’re facing your audience, there are a couple of things to remember.

Moving and Talking

If you’re the kind of person who likes to stroll around while presenting, try to make sure that the acoustics in the room don’t prevent you from being clearly heard at all times. When using a microphone in front of a larger audience, try to stay “on-mike” at all times. The microphone will usually be the kind (whether wired or wireless) which requires you to speak right into it. Hold it no more than 10 cm from your face and slightly to the side so that your plosive sounds do not pop, and keep it there throughout the presentation. All your audience deserves to hear what you have to say; and you’ll end up with a far better result if you’re being recorded or streamed over the internet.

When drawing out your material

Try not to describe elements just in visual terms. While words like “see” and “look” are fine, don’t just tell your audience to “look at the links in red” without elaborating a little on what they might contain. Although you will have given your blind audience members a short text document, there are elements such as the light in the room, screen size etc, which mean you can’t guarantee that all other membesr of that audience will see the screen as clearly as you would like.

The Text Document

PowerPoint is designed to present material in a way which is visually appealing. While there is a raft of things which can be done to optimise your presentation for a blind audience member, this depends on their having access to a laptop, a screen reader and at the very least, PowerPoint viewer. There is also a braille note taker on the market which contains such a viewer but this is only one of several available.

The advantage of creating a short text document alongside your presentation is that this can be used to meet a range of needs in a range of formats.

IT can:

• Be read on a laptop using a screen reader by someone who may not own Microsoft Office,
•  
• Be printed in large print,
•  
• Be transferred to a braille note taker, or
•  
• Be brailled in hard copy on a braille embosser.

While you may be familiar with the needs and equipment of a student in your class, such a document will help you meet the needs of audience members with who you are not familiar, should you present over the internet or to a large conference.

Writing the Document

A simple text editor such as Notepad, WordPad or Apple Mac’s Text Editor wil suffice for this purpose.

Write down the number and title of each slide, with a short explanation of what that slide contains beneath it. This need not be long or complicated, depending on what you wish to convey. Remember, the visual peal of your presentation may be lost on a blind audience member, but the information contained in it is vital.

A sample slide description might look something like this:

Slide One: Dividing Your Time: A Discussion on how NewZealanders divide their time between work and leisure.
(Of course, this being the title slide of the presentation, there may not be anything else on that slide to describe.)

Slide Three: What About the Kids?
Chart showing the correlation between the age of a child and the average number of hours a woman works each week.
(You would then list the figures which demonstrate the correlation.)

If this sounds a little daunting, check out this short tutorial on writing descriptive text from the University of Wisconsin.

Summary

All this sounds like a great deal to remember, particularly when considered on top of the natural anxiety which goes with making any presentation. However, if your presentation is clear, well-contrasted and uncluttered and you accompany it with descriptive notes, you’ll go alogn way to presenting well, whatever the needs of your audience.