Do you need some hands-on PowerPoint accessibility practice? Below you will find a practice file and an answer key file. There is an introduction video and an answer key video to follow along with.
Download the practice file and watch the introduction video.
Download the Answer Key file and watch the video.
This post will guide users through how to create an accessible pie chart in PowerPoint. Pie charts and bar graphs are inherently inaccessible when built within PowerPoint. There are additional steps that must be completed in order to make a pie chart accessible.
Need more PowerPoint accessibility guides?
This video will provide a detailed walkthrough of how to make an accessible Pie Chart in PowerPoint.
This image represents an accessible pie chart that includes labels and patterns.
There is no reason to hide or confuse data in a pie chart. Be specific and direct and add data labels to all data points in any chart!
Patterns are more accessible to a wider array of people with disabilities. Instead of relying on color alone (which is an accessibility failure) – use a pattern and a color.
You might consider inserting the Pie Chart as a flattened image and providing alternate text instead. Screen readers can have difficulty reading the contents of a pie chart within the PPT itself.
Canvas Studio makes it easy to host a captioned video for content that you or someone else has created. This guide explains just how to do it!
Captioning is an important aspect of accessibility, and captioning in Canvas studio can be a breeze. If you are using Canvas and are posting videos; they need to be captioned. This post is not going to explain why captioning is important, but rather; how do you do it in Canvas Studio.
Canvas Studio offers a unique approach to captioning videos for content that you might own or do not own. It is also a premium feature – so be sure to check with your Canvas Admin to see if it is available.
This video will walk you through the steps needed to host a captioned video in Canvas Studio. The watch time is 2 minutes and 5 seconds.
The basic premise is to get an SRT file, and then upload it into Canvas studio. Once you have the video captioned, it can easily be placed on the page. This section will cover the following steps:
There are many tools to get an SRT file for a video that you are trying to caption. Here is one method using Otter.ai to create an SRT file. Make sure to edit it for accuracy!
In order to properly display a video using Canvas Studio – it must be added to your library. Here are the steps:
Get into edit mode on the canvas page that you want to add your newly captioned video
That’s it!
Are you working with documents like PowerPoint, PDFs, or Microsoft Word files? Check out some of my other posts.
Slide titles should be unique. Every slide in the slide deck should have a purposeful name. It’s easy to use duplicate titles but do your best to avoid duplicates.
Slide titles are easy to manage if using an accessible slide theme.
People who rely on assistive technology to review presentations will often navigate by the heading or title structure. If you end up converting the document to another format like PDF, the slide titles will come through as headings.
In the example below there are 5 different slides that share the exact same title.
In order to apply unique slide titles simply add a number to the end of each slide. The quickest method to change the title of a slide is to edit in outline view.
Then simply add a number or change the title altogether. The image below shows an outline view of a presentation with numbers added to make slide titles independent.
The built-in accessibility checker within PowerPoint is exceptional at notifying of this error. Would you rather hide the slide titles?
Content should appear in the outline view. Sometimes using textboxes can interfere with accessibility, so only use them if they are a part of your accessible slide design theme.
In order for content to be the most accessible to people who use screen readers it is recommended that all content appears in the outline view of PowerPoint. The outline view shows a text-based version of the content with your file.
Additionally, the outline view offers a snapshot of all of the major content types in your presentation. It is an excellent method for organizing and chunking your information. It is also a great way to create a quickly accessible version for people with disabilities!
The textbox feature will allow you to add extra content to a slide but it might not be accessible and it will not appear in Outline View properly. Additionally, it will cause extra problems when adjusting the reading and arrange order.
This is purely based on using a theme and a slide template.
The last step of this process is to actually use the content boxes to place your content. Do not add additional text boxes in this step. Simply click into one of the content boxes to add the desired information. Using a template will not only add all content to the outline view, but it will also be in the correct reading order!
Edit the slide master theme in order to develop custom templates and ensure all the content is in order and available in the outline view.
