Checking accessibility for Microsoft PowerPoint presentations – Part 1

Have you ever finished the slides for a PowerPoint presentation and thought to yourself: “Ah! Finally done!”? But, are you really done?

PowerPoint presentations are a common part of work life nowadays. Sometimes we use them to share research findings, sometimes they are part of internal or external training courses. Sometimes they are used to explain restructuring, and sometimes they are used for teambuilding events and quizzes. A lot of us would probably say that we (of course!) know how to make a PowerPoint presentation. But do we know how to make sure it is an accessible presentation too?

Luckily for us, Microsoft already supports accessibility in PowerPoint presentations. In the Review tab, we can click on “Check Accessibility”, which opens a sidebar with an overview of accessibility settings and issues found. Let’s go through a few of them step by step to see what they are about.

Colour and Contrast

If there are any issues with hard to read text due to colour contrast, it will be listed here. We can click on the field “Hard-to-read contrast”, and land on the slide where the issue appears. The problematic text is also already selected, so you can see exactly which element is problematic. PowerPoint will suggest different colours to choose from to resolve the issue, or you could just choose a different colour yourself. Importantly, PowerPoint will only compare the contrast between text and the colour of the text box itself. In other words, if you add text over an image or coloured background, PowerPoint will not detect any contrast issues. Similarly, if you use an image that already has bad contrast, PowerPoint is not able to detect this as an issue.

Why is this important?

Anyone with a visual impairment or colour blindness might struggle to get information from the slide if the colour contrast is not good enough.

Media and Illustrations

Missing alt text

Images, illustrations, and even groups of objects in PowerPoint should have alternative text, or alt text for short, to describe it. If we click on “Missing alt text”, the object in question is automatically selected and the side panel for alt text opens. You can then enter a description. PowerPoint does offer an AI generated descriptive text, however this is often inaccurate or not detailed enough. We recommend writing your own alt text.

Why is this important?

Alt text for images and illustrations is important for screen reader users. Screen readers read out the description to ensure that someone unable to see the image still gets all the information they need.

Missing audio or video subtitles

You can embed both audio and video into a PowerPoint presentation, but if you do, you should also provide subtitles. When clicking on “Missing audio or video subtitles”, a side pane will open that allows you to add subtitles (or captions) to your audio or video. However, PowerPoint will not know if your video already has subtitles coded into it. Be aware that in this case, it may still highlight the video as an issue despite it being fine.

Why is this important?

Anyone who cannot hear a video or audio file can follow the content by reading the subtitles.

Tables

Creating accessible tables can be a bit tricky, and generally we advise avoiding using tables as much as possible. However, there are some things that can make tables more accessible.

Missing table header

If there is a table and the Accessibility Check highlights that there is a missing table header, we can click on it. It will select the table with the missing header, and we can choose from different options. Which one you choose depends on the setup of your table. Importantly, you can choose to either make an existing row or column the header or insert a new row or column to become the header.

Why is this important?

A designated table header is important for anyone using screen reader software. The software can detect the header, which helps it to describe the data within the table in a meaningful way.

Use of merged or split cells

When creating a table in Microsoft PowerPoint or Word, we can merge or split individual cells. This might make sense visually sometimes but is ultimately not accessible. When we check “Use of merged or split cells”, PowerPoint should highlight any tables that have this issue.

Why is this important?

If you use merged or split cells, screen reader software is often not able to describe data from a table properly.

These are just a few accessibility checks that PowerPoint can provide. We will explore more in Part 2 in August.