[Athen] Reading Order in MS PowerPoint

[Paul E. Paire]

Teresa,

Don't miss that the reading order is bottom up in the Selection pane, not top down like you'd expect.

-Paul

From: athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Teresa Haven
Sent: Monday, April 07, 2014 3:54 PM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network (athen-list at u.washington.edu)
Subject: [Athen] Reading Order in MS PowerPoint

Greetings, all.  I'm attempting to retrofit a PPT presentation created by a colleague who, until recently, was unfamiliar with accessibility needs.  This particular presentation has been a work in progress for many years and across many versions of PPT.  One slide in particular has a lot of separate text elements that need to be read in order to make sense; when listening to it initially with JAWS, just a couple of items were read out of order so I attempted to clean that up (am in Office 2010 for Windows); according to Microsoft's help site I should fix the reading order using Arrange>Selection Pane.  When I viewed the reading order it was NOTHING like what I was hearing with JAWS - it looked completely random, despite the fact that JAWS was doing a pretty good job with the page.  Well, I "fixed" the reading order in Selection Pane and now the slide is read as complete gibberish by JAWS - nothing is in order.  Yes, I still have a copy of the original file and can go back, or I can re-create the slide from scratch, but does anyone have a suggestion for how to reliably repair reading order in PPT slides?

Thanks for your ideas,
Teresa

Teresa Haven, Ph.D.
Accessibility Analyst
Northern Arizona University
(928) 523-6042

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