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Creating Accessible In-Person Presentations

July 26, 2022

Debbie Krahmer

CLIR DLF

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Introduction 1

Land acknowledgement
Language notes
Questions in chat
Code of Conduct

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I’m speaking to you from the unceded and traditional lands of the Onyota’a:ká (oh-nyo-DA-aw-GA“), the People of the Upright Stone, or Oneida people.

During this presentation, I will use the terms Disabled or Non-disabled, as well as Identity-first language. I acknowledge the difference in ways that disability is described and discussed. As it pertains to person-first (person with a disability) vs. identity-first (disabled person) language, it is important that it be acknowledged that society plays a heavy role in disabling people, while also avoiding the implication that disability is inherently negative. However, it is important to listen to disabled people when deciding which is appropriate to use in individual contexts.

I have a visual disability, so I can’t always see questions that come up chat or if you have your virtual hand up. You can put your questions into the chat, but I won’t be able to address them until the end, or during times when I ask if there’s any questions.

I’d also like to take a moment to remind the viewers that we ask you to adhere to the DLF Code of Conduct when interacting with this presentation, and in asking questions.

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Introduction 2

2016 guidelines and 2017 webinar team: Eleanor Dickson Koehl, Chelchie Juliet Rowell, Yasmeen L. Shorish and Carli Spina
2020 guidelines and webinar team: Debbie Krahmer, Lydia Tang, Sarah Goldstein, Stephanie Rosen, Alex Wermer-Colan, and Amy Vecchione.
2022 guidelines team: Natalie Bond, Debbie Krahmer, Carrie Pirmann, and Adele Fitzgerald.

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To get help

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Purpose and Overview

Making your slides and presentation accessible
Focus on PowerPoint and Google Slides

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Accessible ≠ Boring

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One final side-note, as this is something I come across a lot as an accessibility advocate. I want to be clear that “accessible” does not have to equal “boring”. You can be creative and exciting and interactive and keep your work accessible. However, there are a lot of moving pieces and knowledge that is needed to be a creative, interactive speaker--a lot of practice and training. You won’t be a Ted Talk expert following 10 simple rules, any more than my interest in scifi and astronomy makes me an astronaut. There is only so much information that can be conveyed in a 1-hour presentation, as you know. Accessibility is no different. Accessibility, design, public speaking is all a nuanced area of knowledge. So, think of these as guidelines, and helpful hints, or top ten simple rules or whatever, but also forgive yourself for getting things wrong. You didn’t wake up one day with the knowledge of a librarian--you went to school and you worked and you continue to expand and learn. This is exactly the same. So try hard, but forgive your mistakes. You won’t be an accessibility master at the end of this. But hopefully you'll have more information and more tools to hopefully make this less intimidating.

�

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Delivering Presentations

Use the Microphone
Spell out acronyms, define jargon.
Face the Audience.
Have a backup for your script/speaker notes.

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I’d like to start out by covering some basic information about delivering a presentation online. Clear audio is very important. AS you can see, I’m using a headset with a microphone directly in front of my mouth. No matter what, you should always use a microphone; it ensures the best quality audio, makes creating transcripts and closed captioning easier, and, for in person events, ensures that everyone can hear you. It doesn’t matter if you can project your voice like an opera singer: USE. THE. MICROPHONE. And speak directly directly into the microphone. If it helps, think of it being attached to your lips. If you move away from the mic (cover mic for no audio), your audio will cut in and out.

While speaking, use a clear, steady voice. Think of yourself as a news anchor--you’re calmly reporting information to a wide variety of people--or you can think about just having a coffee conversation with a friend. Take your time, and don’t try to rush.

�When you are using acronyms, you should read them aloud and make sure they’re clear. For example, I am a member of ENY/ACRL – E.N.Y./A.C.R.L. or “eenie Ackrl”, the eastern new york chapter of the ACRL. Reading them out just makes it easier to caption what you’re saying and make sure it’s accurate. Additionally, try to avoid jargon, or if you do use it, define the term if it’s not familiar to your audience, and make sure that you have the proper spelling available to your live captioner or the person doing your closed captioning.

�Now, during a live presentation, be sure to face the audience throughout the session, so your facial expressions and your lips will be easier to read. Since technology is always tricky, be prepared to have your script or presenter notes in a printed file or on your phone, that way you’re not caught out if you can’t get the right display going on the computer. Try to keep these notes or your phone away from covering your face. It’s very tempting, when you’re gesturing to your presentation, to just keep talking. For many people, that’s like (cover mic for no audio). Keep your mic on your face, keep your face at the audience, and if you’re turned away, just stop talking for a moment. �

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Designing Your Presentation 1

Make materials available ahead of time

.pptx or .ppt, or Google Slides
Not PDF

Use built-in templates, layouts and styles for accessibility
Leave space for captions

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Now, let’s move into the Design portion of the presentation. It’s good practice to have your slides and other presentation materials available prior to the actual presentation time, so that audience members can be prepared to fully participate. For example, it’s helpful to me to have access to the slides to follow along on a laptop or tablet with a screen reader while also watching the presentation. Make sure you’re sharing it as a PPT or Google Slides format, NOT PDF. This is because powerpoint format and google slides includes many things that make it more accessible than a PDF, including reading order, proper tags and full access to notes and alt text. If you can make a fully accessible PDF, then you can include that as well.

�The most important part of what I’m about to tell you is that you should use the built-in templates for creating your presentations. This is because the templates are already designed to work with assistive technology, such as screen readers. When you create your own slides, by putting in text boxes on a blank slide, you will have to do more work on your own to make them accessible. You’re welcome to do that, but we won’t be covering the difficult setting in this presentation. For this presentation, we’re focusing on “easy.”

�Additionally, using templates creates an automatic outline. You can view it in the outline view. Templates in PowerPoint and Google Slides also have built-in reading order, styles, and other things that make them accessible. If you need to make a change throughout the presentation, you can make those changes in the master slide, and it’ll work for all the slides. For example, if you want to add more text boxes or media markers, in PowerPoint go to the View tab, Master Views section and select Slide Master. In the slide master editor, select the layout you want to edit. You can insert new placeholders, or even add images or text that will appear on all slides with that layout. Close Master View to save and apply. ��In Google Slides, you want to go to slide → Edit Theme. In the Theme editor, by default it’ll open to the layout master slide that you were on or you can select them from the list. Click on Insert and select the objects or boxes you want. If you want to include the same text/image on every single slide, you can also insert the text in this screen to have it appear on all slides.

�Make sure the template is applied to your presentation before making changes to the master slide--every time you change the design template, it’ll reset your master slides to the defaults. Make sure you leave a good bottom margin to make space for closed captioning.

�Additionally, if you’re including charts or tables of data, please use the built-in options for creating them rather than screen shots. This will make it the most accessible to everyone. Otherwise, if you’re using screenshots from other programs, you need to include alt text or enough textual information such as a citation so the audience has the same access to the same data. More information on this a little later.

�I’d also like to address the reading order at this point. When you use the templates,the reading order of your slide is pre-determined. You can change it on a slide-by-slide basis, but if you make edits to the master slide or change your design template, you will need to re-check that reading order. Just click in a blank area of the slide so that you don’t have anything like text actually selected, then tab to see the order. To change the order, click on the box and then right click to bring up the “bring forward/send to back” options. If you’re using a keyboard, it’s actually a massive pain in the ass to try to adjust reading order in the current versions of PPT (PPT 2016 or PPT for Mac seems to retain the old way of arranging the read order).

�In GOogle Slides, you can tab through to see the order, and then fix it in the Arrange menu. If you’re using the defaults, the layout tends to be logical: slide title first, then main text or image placeholder, or left side first, etc.

�

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Designing your Presentation 2

Set Language
24-32 pt (minimum) sans serif fonts
Use bullets or built-in styles

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So, you have your basic design set, and you’re selecting from the pre-defined templates. The first thing you want to do is make sure the language is set for your slides. This is especially important for screen readers, so everyone knows they’re using the correct language. It may already be set to the default language of your programs or computer, but it’s always worth double-checking, or change it in case you’re presenting in a different language. In PowerPoint, you go to the file menu, More, Options and select language. FOr Google slides, it’s File - Language.

�Easy!

�Next, your font size should be at least 28 pt. You should use a single, simple font type throughout the presentation, usually we suggest sans serif like verdana or arial. This is where it’s also more accessible to make the PPT file available ahead of time, so the individual can change the font sizes or font type to what works best for them.

�So, using structure is important. You can use bullets for this. Again, use the built-in options for bullets because, for example, for screen reader software it’ll tell you something like “Bulleted list, 4 items…” If you use an asterix or an image of your own without having that bulleted (or numbered) list, it makes your presentation less accessible. Use the built-in styles or headers to give a visual (and accessible) hierarchy to the slides. Big, bold text = Heading level 1 Title. Smaller text = higher number. Etc. just making the font type, the font size, or bolding/italicizing text creates a visual difference, but it isn’t accessible to a screen reader.

�

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Simple is often better

Focus on what you’re presenting
Lighten the cognitive load with predictable structure

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Chaotic slide

Where am I?

Why is this happening?

What’s going on?

Now I’m over here!

What will happen next?

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Additionally, when you have unpredictable elements like sideways text or animated gifs, you’re making your audience work a lot harder to follow along … unpredictability can be very costly in terms of cognitive processing. If people are getting frustrated, have difficulty seeing or hearing what’s happening, they’re anxious, whatever--it takes away from being able to fully participate in a presentation. If you’re squinting at text, or you’re trying to figure out what that weird image MEANS, or if you’re focused on why in the world this person used that particular gif, then you’re less able to engage with the presentations. Having a predictable structure helps your audience to anticipate what will happen next, it’ll be standard, so they’ll be able to catch on quick to what you are showing. [state this better] [demo chaotic vs. ordered] Keep things simple.

�One example I’ve used a few times in the past is imagine you’re in a physics lecture. The professor puts up a picture of a giraffe on the screen, while talking about Hawking Radiation and black holes. The professor is talking about theories, math, etc. and there’s a picture of a giraffe. Why? What does the giraffe mean? You’re spending your time trying to figure that out instead of focusing on what the professor is actually trying to teach.

�

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Dark text on a light background 1

Contrast Checker contrastchecker.com

Foreground color: #000000 (black)
Background color: #FFFFFF (white)
Contrast Ratio: 21:1

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Use a good contrast for your colors--white on black, black on white, etc. You can use dark text on a light background, or light text on a dark background. These slides use black text on a white background, which, according to contrastchecker.com, gives you a contrast ratio of 21:1 (high contrast). You can get creative, but make sure that you’re picking good color contrasts. Minimum guidelines for contrast ratios are 4.5:1 (or for large text 3:1). The contrastchecker.com site will show you success and failures for all sorts of color combinations.

There are also some colors you should be careful about mixing, despite the fact they may be high contrast. Red and blue are also terrible together-they tend to visually vibrate or move, and in terms of color blindness, it can be difficult to see the contrast between them. Now I’m going to show you a slide. If you have color or light-sensitive migraines, you may wish to look away, but I will try to not keep it up more than 30 seconds. �

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Dark (green) text on a light (red) background

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Dark text on a light background 2

Contrast Checker contrastchecker.com

Foreground color: #2E481E (dark green)
Background color: #FFCCC0 (light red)
Contrast Ratio: 7.11:1

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URLs

Short URLs (tinyurl.com)
Read it aloud “wiki.diglib.org or w-i-k-i-dot-d-i-g-l-i-b-dot-o-r-g”
https://tinyurl.com/Creating2022

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Alt Text 1

Writing Good Alt Text

What is the image?
Why is it here?
https://tinyurl.com/2014AltText

Write alt text for charts too!

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Speaking of what people can or cannot see, it’s important to provide clear text alternatives to non-textual content, aka images and videos. IMages have meaning, otherwise why else would you use them? So it’s important to make it available to everyone. Adding in alt text is one of the easiest ways to do this. In powerpoint, just right-click on the image, select format image, and then go to title (or edit alt text in in the right-click menu). PPT includes both title and description, but it depends on what the software the person is using will read. It’s easiest to fill them both in with the same information, to be safe. Sometimes people will also suggest to have a short title with more information in the description. FOr Google slide, just right click on the image and choose Alt Text.

�What makes good Alt text? Well, think to yourself about why you're using this image, and what you’re trying to say. Why is this image here? If you’re not sure, or if it’s just decorative, you might consider if there’s a better use for the slide’s space. Is it important to let people know that the image is of a book, or is it more important that it’s an old book with a damaged spine? Does the title of the book matter, or that it’s a red book? Think about what you want to convey and then get it across. For more advice on writing alt text, [link]

�Additionally, when you're presenting, it’s helpful to describe what is on the screen. If it’s important enough to include in your presentation, then make sure everyone can access the same information. As a disabled person, to me it’s terrible to be in a webinar or workshop, and someone put up a slide that’s an image of a joke, and everyone else in the audience is laughing, but you have no idea what’s going on. It’s just silence, audience laughter, and then maybe the speaker chuckles before moving to the next slide. What happened? What did I miss? It feels terrible as a person in the audience, so don’t leave anyone out.

�If alt text doesn’t make sense for your presentation format, for whatever reason, then there are a few other things you can do. You can include a caption instead, or put the image description in the notes of the slides. You can include a link or citation to where the actual data or image information is at if it’s super complicated. You can even hide the explanatory text in a text box behind the image--make sure that it’s part of the overall reading order of the slide, and that it’s hidden well enough so that it’s not distracting to the non-disabled audience.

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Alt Text 2

Video clips should be captioned
Include a descriptive introduction

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Do an accessibility check!

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Questions?

Forum@diglib.org
Guidelines and resources https://tinyurl.com/Creating2022

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