[Athen] Accessible PowerPoint Slides

[Karlen Communications]

Hi Everyone:

 

I sent this to Howard who suggested that I should share this with the list.

 

Note to Karen S: Thank you for letting me know that the Outline view is
often accessed in PowerPoint instead of the normal slide layout view. Makes
sense and another reason to use the Text and Content placeholders on slides
as they will always appear in the Outline view.

 

The problem with using Text Boxes arises when the slides are sent as a slide
show or need to be put into Braille or large print and we use the Outline
view to do this because it is faster..if we create the slides correctly.

 

You will spend as much time copying and pasting the content to the
background as you will copying and pasting them into the Outline version of
the presentation. (F12, Save as Outline)

 

What I am doing as a best practice is to create the Word document (Outline)
at the same time I am remediating the slides for accessibility. This gives
me both versions of the presentation at the time of the presentation and
clients can archive both versions. It also saves them work because most
don't understand how to set up a well-structured Word document for Braille
or large print.

 

You Save the presentation as an Outline, remove the formatting in the Word
document/RTF (Ctrl + A then Alt + H, E to erase formatting), add the correct
structure in Word using Styles, then begin remediating the horrid
content/layout on slides using the Word document as a sandbox/final resting
place for complete content. When you are finished, you have two accessible
documents.well, the PowerPoint may not be able to be fully accessible due to
its format type, you have the Word outline document to support it.

 

Since I have to copy the information out of horribly created text box-based
slides anyway, might as well put it to good use.

 

My first "option" if these are your slides, is to use a default text or
content placeholder, remove the bullets and numbering and then resize it for
what you want. This is easy to do and I would even suggest creating a slide
layout of one or two of these so you can access them easily from the Home
Ribbon, Insert Slide.

 

There is a document on the Karlen Communications website on Adding
Accessible Placeholders to PowerPoint:

http://www.karlencommunications.com/handouts.html

 

I've just added a sample no design PowerPoint presentation with some custom
slide layouts that you can copy into existing presentations and use. I
wasn't sure if I could attach it to this post. The document is called
Accessible Slide Templates and is on the Handouts page as well. I tested it
and keep getting an error message when I choose to open the file.eventually
it goes away if you click OK a few times.maybe try saving it instead of
opening it. Am working on a solution. Let me know if you have problems and
I'll send it to you directly.

 

Cheers, Karen

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