Accessible PowerPoint for Education

Prologue

Note - there are various guides to PowerPoint and accessibility but this one is different - it is specific to the provision of educational materials in the UK. It is more rigorous because it takes into account our legal obligations to students with disabilities.

This guide is long and will take quite some time to study. However, all the information contained within is important if you want to help meet the University's ethical and legal obligations to students with disabilities. Understanding the issues is important to all academic staff and should not be put off until the first student with a disability turns up on your course module in week 1.

Overview

If you use PowerPoint presentations in lectures or if you create slide shows for students to access in their own time, then you need to take all reasonable steps to ensure that each individual student can access those presentations.  If a student has special needs that relate to a disability then it is not only good practice but in Great Britain is also a legal obligation.  (Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001) According to law those steps need to be anticipatory in nature, i.e.;

You need to anticipate that students with disabilities may attend and do the necessary work in advance to ensure their experience, on the day of the class, is of equal educational value. 

Two types of advice are contained in this guide.  Some advice should be followed every time you use PowerPoint and is intended to help you avoid pitfalls and to reduce workload.  There is also advice which involves a greater amount of work but which can be skipped over if you know for certain that none of the students in your class will need those adaptations. 

If you are teaching in the early weeks of a course you may not have the class list early enough to know what adaptations might be required.  The anticipatory nature of legislation means that you will have to take steps to cater for all disabilities and that means you should finalise the content of your PowerPoint presentations several weeks in advance of the delivery date and if necessary recruit the support of those colleagues who can help produce transcripts of audio clips, subtitles on video clips etc.

A teacher who uses PowerPoint will only need to learn how to use PowerPoint itself in order to address accessibility.  Teachers do not need to use the assistance software that some of their students need to use and do not need to learn to use specialist printing equipment themselves.   HOWEVER, teachers do need to learn how to use PowerPoint properly so they don’t defeat or interfere with the technology that their students use and they do need to know how to use PowerPoint’s own accessibility features.  

Teachers DO need to give thought to varying the media by which they communicate concepts. For example, a single concept may be presented using a table of data from an experiment, a flow diagram, a sequence of pithy statements, a video clip of an interview with an expert etc.  Presenting a concept through multiple media is the best way of enhancing accessibility and can only be planned by the subject expert who fully understands the detailed learning outcomes. 

(Although this document concerns accessibility from the point of view of a student some of the advice equally applies to teachers with special needs.)

Delivery of Presentations

This guide considers the use of PowerPoint in a classroom and also its use to provide students with material to study in their own time.  It is worth noting that for many students who use assistive technology the best way to access the slides and audio is via their own computer. So, in nearly every case it will be an advantage if you distribute the PowerPoint file in advance of the class when you intend to use it, so students can bring their own laptop to the class and access the slides using whatever assistive technology they prefer.

A more radical approach will be to adopt a “flipped” approach to teaching with PowerPoint.  That is;

• record lectures in advance using the narration feature of PowerPoint
• publish the file in the VLE (in accessible format as described below)
• use the classroom for activities in which the students apply what they have learned

This will benefit students with disabilities but also any student that finds they need to study the material at a slower pace.  It also means that you are no longer constrained to providing materials in one hour chunks so the duration of the presentation can better match the subject matter.

Distributing PowerPoint Files

In many of the section below you will see a note advising you to provide students with the PowerPoint file in advance of the lecture so they can access the slides using their own assistive technology in the classroom.  You may also want to provide the class with the file in order to study it after the lecture.  Either way you need to give a little consideration to file formats.

Bottom Line for Distributing PowerPoint Slideshows

Best practice is this:

If the original slideshow file is reasonably small (say, less than 100MB):

• Share the original PPTX file with your students

If the slideshow file is very big (say, more than 100MB) because it includes embedded video, then distribute it in two ways;

1. Publish an exported MP4 video to a streaming server, e.g. Panopto or YouTube and give students a link.
2. AND, make a copy of the PPTX file with video stripped out or compressed using a tool such as PPtSquash and share that with your students.

If the slideshow will be presented in the classroom make sure it is shared with the class with enough advanced notice so that they can download to their laptops and access during the class. Be prepared to distribute some or part of the content in other formats according to the needs of specific students. For example, slide notes in MS Word format, diagrams printed on tactile paper optionally with Braille labels.

.PPTX

The most recent versions of PowerPoint use a file format that is compatible with other slide show software and can be distinguished because it uses the file extension .pptx In order to access these files on their own computer students need to do one of the following:

• Install a recent version of PowerPoint itself (PCs and Mac)
• Download the latest free PowerPoint viewer from the Microsoft web site
• Install the latest ‘import plugins’ if they use an old version of PowerPoint
• Install alternate slide show software such as “Open Office” or “LibreOffice” which can import PowerPoint files.

This format of slideshow file is usually highly accessible for students who use assistive technology. Accessing your slide shows on their own computers may be considerably more usable than reading your slides from the projector screen in the classroom. However, the process of distributing slideshows and therefore accessibility can be seriously compromised if the file is very big. If the slideshows contains embedded video material they may reach sizes greater than a Gigabyte and may be impractical for students to download from a web site. 

.PPT

In PowerPoint 2003 and earlier a different file format was used.  However, these days very few people are using such old versions of PowerPoint so providing copies of your presentation in this format should be unnecessary.

.MP4

If you have recorded narration onto a PowerPoint presentation and have included video of your head and shoulders it may become impractical to distribute the PowerPoint file itself because it is too big. PowerPoint can export the recorded presentation to an MP4 video file. Sharing the MP4 file via a download link is pointless because it will be no smaller than the PowerPoint file and may even be considerably bigger. So, it MUST be published on a streaming video service.  That means students can start viewing the presentation less than a second after clicking on a link and don’t need to wait for the entire presentation to download before viewing. 

A disadvantage of video formats is that they are much less accessible to some students with disabilities. Student who need to use text to speech software will not be able to access text that is shown within the video stream. That is why you need to make a copy of the PowerPoint with video stripped out - so the text and audio can be accessed while keeping the file size small enough to download.

.PDF

Portable document format is design for sharing any material which can be printed.  PowerPoint presentations can easily be exported in PDF format.  However, for many students with disabilities it is much preferable to provide the original PowerPoint file so they can apply their own preferences to colours, fonts and page layout before printing.

Fundamentals of Accessible PowerPoint

This is a list of advice which you should always follow regardless of the specific needs of your students.

Text

• Do not put large amounts of text onto any slide. Provide large chunks of text separately or within the notes features of PowerPoint.
• It is vital that you use correct spelling not only of ordinary dictionary words but especially of technical jargon.  Add your jargon to your personal dictionary to make this job easier.
• It is vital that if you use abbreviations they are standard abbreviations within your subject domain and you consistently use the same abbreviations. For example, be consistent with the placement of full stops.
• If you make use of symbols such as Greek letters then always use the insert symbol functionality of PowerPoint to enter them.  Do NOT bodge approximations of the symbols using characters from the keyboard or by fiddling with fonts or by using drawing tools.  For example, do not simulate a multiplication symbol with the letter X in a sans serif font. Do not simulate an arrow using a dash and an angled bracket.
• Avoid entering text characters from the keyboard for embellishment or visual effects. For example, do not add a long string of equals signs to underline some text.
• Don’t mix up letter O and digit zero.
• Never use roman numerals for visual effect but always use them where the subject domain requires them for technical correctness.
• Full stops, commas, and question marks will change the timing and tonality of the synthesised voice that some students will hear when they access the presentation but some more unusual punctuation symbols are announced and this can be irritating if they have been over used.  For example, using bullet point formatting is much better than ending every item in a list with a semi colon.
• Put essential information on the opening slide that identifies the lecture, describes its content and mentions any particular requirements.  For example, if the slide contains audio or video it is useful to know this from the start.
• Ensure that the title text is different on every slide so students who use software aids can more easily navigate from slide to slide.

Templates

• Use standard slide templates.  In particular only choose templates that provide a title box at the top of the slide.  This may seem irrelevant to you and most students but if you don’t use the templates the slides can be very hard to navigate by students using various accessibility tools.
• If you need multiple blocks of content on a slide use a template that provides multiple blocks.  This ensures that the blocks are accessed in the correct order regardless of what accessibility aids the student is using.
• Do not manually add text boxes to a blank template.  This can make the slide indecipherable for some students who need to ‘TAB’ from text box to text box.
• If you have accidentally used the “blank slide” template and therefore lack a proper title you can use the layout button on the Home ribbon to switch to a better template.

Colour and style

• Use a dark background with light text or a light background with dark text.
• Never use colour alone to contrast text with its background.
• Do not use saturated colours for either background or text.  
• Do not rely on colours alone to indicate meaning within the slides.
• Do not use arty, funny, cursive, novelty or overly bold fonts.

Transitions and Animations

• Transition effects between slides are fine to use so long as you use them for purely decorative effect and they are over quickly.   Some students will not be able to view transition effects and will not know they are there. 
• Adding a very short ‘whoosh’ or ‘click’ sound effect to slide transitions may be helpful to some students because it will indicate during the lecture that you have changed slides.
• Animation of elements on a slide ought to be acceptable in principle but their rendering in text to speech software seems to be buggy and some text may ‘disappear’.  
• It is recommended that you never use animations purely for visual appeal.   (This advice may be changed if support for animations in assistive technology is improved.)
• If you want to present information in sequence use a series of slides instead.  If you want to use animation to help students attain a learning outcome of the course go ahead and do so.  However, bear in mind that some students who rely on assistive technology may not be able to access animations and you must present the concepts in one or more other ways too, e.g. with descriptive text in a hand-out or via a classroom activity.  This needs to be prepared in advance and not done at a later date in response to complaints.

Chemical and Mathematical Equations

• Take time to find the correct symbols, in particular the various different arrow symbols used by chemists.  Use the insert symbol command.  Bear in mind that some students will need significant technical support in order to access equations so it will be helpful to provide some examples to students at the start of the course.
• If an equation goes on a single line possibly with some superscripts or subscripts then implement it as a line of text within one of the text boxes of the slide using formatting as appropriate.
• If an equation has multiple terms, multiple levels of embedded parentheses, integration symbols or other two dimensional elements then implement it using PowerPoint’s built in equation editor.  Ensure that the symbols are large enough and separated enough to be intelligible on tactile paper.  If the equations consist of multiple text boxes and line art, group the various components so they are classified by PowerPoint as a single graphic.

If your subject area requires the frequent use of mathematical equations then you should evaluate specialist software for creating equations.  Some products are highly accessible and can even produce a plain text description as well as the graphical image which can be inserted into PowerPoint.

Including Media

PowerPoint allows the inclusion of multimedia such as still images, audio and video clips.  These provide a much greater challenge for accessibility than text.  A basic first step to ensuring accessibility is to understand its educational purpose.

• Which learning outcome does this multimedia item support?

If you cannot answer this question there are two options:

1. Remove the item
2. Use text inserted into the slide or attached to the multimedia that succinctly tells students that the item is decorative, amusing or otherwise not of educational value so they can skip over it.

If you can identify the educational purpose of the multimedia, this will help you to address accessibility for all students.  Some work that needs to be carried out to make multimedia accessible to all students takes significant time and expertise and therefore should be avoided if you are certain that none of the class require this.  Students with different needs will require different adaptations so detailed advice about multimedia follows under headings that apply to students who use different assistive technology.

Student Notes (Speaker Notes)

PowerPoint has a facility for attaching notes to each slide known as “speaker’s notes”.  Microsoft created this facility for the creation of notes for the speaker to refer to while presenting and not to be seen by the audience.  However, some people print slides and notes side by side for students. How the notes are used by students depends on whether the teacher intends them to add to the notes during the presentation and also depends on the assistive technology the various students use.

Advice for teachers

• Be consistent – it will take time for students to adapt to how you use the notes so don’t switch methods from lecture to lecture.
• Make sure the notes are in the file that you distribute in advance of the lecture and not added at the last minute.
• If you use the notes as intended by Microsoft, i.e. for your own private use, then tell the students to ignore their presence in the file you distribute or distribute a copy of the file with the notes deleted.
• If one or more students require it, export the notes to a separate Word document.  Instructions below.
• If one or more students require it, send the file to support staff for printing in Braille in advance of the lecture.

Exporting Notes to Word

Most of the process of creating a Word document containing the speaker’s notes can be automated - you simply export them from PowerPoint. However, some manual editing of the document is required after the export.

1. Delete all the images of the slides if the end user only requires text.
2. Add a title to the document that identifies the slide show and set it to Heading 1 style.
3. Select each slide title and change to Heading 2 style.  This will aid navigation with assistive technology.

This file can be supplied to your local Braille printing service or can be used as-is by students with text to speech software or other tools for reading text.

Delivering the Lecture

• Make yourself familiar with the working practices that have been agreed on when your students consulted with Disability Services at registration.
  • These may vary from student to student..
  • One student may ‘read’ the PowerPoint slide show during the lecture on a laptop with headphones.
  • Another may access it only after lectures while studying.
• As time goes by you may develop additional practices following feedback from your students.
  • You may announce changes of slide verbally.
  • Say a figure’s name or number before you talk about it.
• Otherwise use the PowerPoint software the same way you would usually use it.

Advice Relating to Students with Specific Needs

Please remember that legislation requires teachers to anticipate that students with disabilities will enrol on their courses.  That means that;

• If you don’t know the specific needs of the students who will attend, all of the following advice must be followed, including that which requires advanced planning.
• The advice may only be skipped over if you know that no attending students require the adaptations.

Students who are profoundly deaf and bring a sign language interpreter to lectures

You can only skip over the advice in this section if you are absolutely certain that none of the students who will attend your class are profoundly deaf and make use of an interpreter.

• If you have included speech audio within slides which you will play during a presentation then you can rely on the interpreter who is attending to interpret the recorded audio.
• If you intend students to access speech audio outside of the class during their studies then you will need to have it transcribed for the deaf students.  This text can be added to the “description” property of the multimedia item within the slide or to the slide notes.  It is crucial that you have this done IN ADVANCE of the lecture so all students gain access to either the audio or the transcript when the lecture takes place.  Students will need to be informed about where to look for the transcript when they prepare for the lecture.
• If you have included non-speech audio which is of educational value you will need to provide some alternate, non-audio material that addresses the same learning objective.  For example, recordings of bird calls could be compared graphically using screen shots from a spectrograph.  This kind of adaptation often benefits all the students in the class.
• If recorded audio is part of a sound track to a video clip which you want students to access outside of the classroom then subtitles are probably more appropriate than a transcript.  You will need to consult with technical experts well in advance for support with the creation of subtitles.  It may be advisable to take the video out of the PowerPoint presentation and deliver it via the university’s streaming video service instead since that has collaborative tools for the creation of subtitles.  You can put a link to the streaming server in the PowerPoint presentation for ease of navigation.

Students who are profoundly deaf and lip read

You can only skip over the advice in this section if you are absolutely certain that none of the students who will attend your class are profoundly deaf and are able to lip read.

• Obviously the student will be unable to lip read from audio only material embedded in your slides but it is also unlikely that video quality will be sufficient to allow lip reading either.
• So, advice is the same as in the previous section EXCEPT that students will certainly need access to transcripts and/or subtitles of the audio material during the lecture as well as after the lecture.  The transcript/subtitles need to be made IN ADVANCE of the lecture.

Students who use hearing aids

You can only skip over the advice in this section if you are absolutely certain that none of the students who will attend your class use hearing aids.

• A student who uses a hearing aid may be unable to clearly perceive nuances in the audio material you use.  If you wish to present audio material you may need to present the same concepts in non-audio format too.  For example, recordings of bird calls could be compared graphically using screen shots from a spectrograph.  This kind of adaptation often benefits all the students in the class.
• If the students are relying on a hearing aid ‘loop’ in the classroom you will need to ensure that you use a computer that is attached to the room’s audio system to run your presentation if it contains any audio material.
• Although you will try your best to speak clearly into the microphone in the classroom it is possible that some of your speech will be difficult to follow. So, it will be an advantage if you record your lecture so that students with hearing aids can review what you said and if necessary pause, rewind and replay difficult to understand sections.
• Bear in mind that students will get the best quality audio when accessing the PowerPoint on their own computer and so a flipped approach to classes may be particularly beneficial.
• If your presentation includes speech audio which is hard to understand (because of a strong regional accent or poor recording quality) then provide a transcript IN ADVANCE of the lecture.

Students with dyslexia

You can only skip over the advice in this section if you are absolutely certain that none of the students who will attend your class are dyslexic.

The most important thing to be aware of with dyslexia is that each person is unique in their personal strategy for accessing text.  That means that the author of text needs to:

1. Use a simple ‘plain vanilla’ style of text.
2. Allow students to change the style themselves to match their own needs.

In terms of PowerPoint presentations this means you should:

• Follow the advice under the heading Fundamentals of Accessible PowerPoint even more diligently than usual.
• Provide your students with a copy of the PowerPoint presentation IN ADVANCE of the lecture. That way the students can alter the fonts and/or colours and they can opt to print them or view a copy on their laptop during the lecture rather than look at the projected image.

Students who use vision aids

Some students whose sight is impaired make use of magnification tools and other assistive technology.  This may be due to low visual acuity across the whole field of vision or visual acuity which is localised into one part of the field of vision.  

• Follow the advice under the heading Fundamentals of Accessible PowerPoint even more diligently than usual.
• Provide your students with a copy of the PowerPoint presentation IN ADVANCE of the lecture. That way the students can view the slides on their laptop during the lecture and make use of the screen magnifier or whichever visual aids work best for their impaired vision.

Students who use text to speech software

You can only skip over the advice in this section if you are absolutely certain that none of the students who will attend your class use text to speech software.

Text to speech software, also known as screen reader software, uses speech synthesis to read out text from computer files and is essential technology for people who are blind or whose visual impairment makes it impossible to read text even if magnified.  The effect is similar to having a human assistant read out the text except that the software is unable to apply much intelligence to the problem of reading text that is scattered about the screen in two dimensions.  The screen reader software that most blind people use, called JAWS is capable of opening PowerPoint slide shows and reading out the text that is on them. It provides keyboard shortcuts to move forward and back through the slides, pause the reading, spell words letter by letter and all sorts of other controls.  So, it should be possible for a single PowerPoint file to be distributed to all students.  

A simple PowerPoint presentation that uses headings, bulleted lists of items etc. may be instantly accessible simply by providing the student with the file via the same mechanism that you provide it to all the other students.  However, bad practice in the layout and design of your PowerPoint slides can defeat the accessibility features.  So;

• Follow the advice under the heading Fundamentals of Accessible PowerPoint even more diligently than usual.

Diagrams, photographs and video will require special attention and only the author of the material or a colleague from the same discipline will be qualified to review this material.  These are treated in three subsections below.

Diagrams

There are two ways that a student who uses text to speech software can access a diagram.

1. By printing the diagram onto tactile paper.
2. By accessing text that describes the diagram.

Although the teacher may not be involved in actually printing the material the teacher is responsible for selecting/creating the best diagram and for providing descriptions when they are needed IN ADVANCE of the lecture.  The first option involves least work for the teacher but some diagrams are simply not intelligible on tactile paper.  So, the first and best option is for the teacher to select or create diagrams that are highly intelligible when printed on tactile paper.  If this cannot be achieved then the teacher must describe the diagram.  Help on adding descriptions properly is given below.

Tips on choosing the best diagram

• The ideal diagram for accessibility consists of black line art on a white background with plenty of space between the various elements.
• A figure, photocopied from a book, which includes lots of text labels will be hard to put onto tactile paper because Braille labels will need to be superimposed by individually translating the labels in the image.
• If a diagram has been created in a vector graphics package it may be possible to change the labels into Braille before printing in a more systematic and efficient way.
• Many diagrams involve images surrounded by blocks of text. However, a more old fashion style may be better in which the images contain one letter labels and all of the text is placed in one block that is indexed with the same single letter labels.  This way the textual element of the diagram is accessible with speech to text software.
• You can create your own diagrams using the tools built into PowerPoint.  If so, remember to select all the elements of the diagram and group them.  This ensures that the various lines, arrows, boxes etc. are recognised as a single diagram.

Printing Diagrams

• Blind students can access line-art diagrams if they are produced on paper with raised lines and bumps.  (Technically this will be German paper, Swell paper or some other similar technology, collectively known as tactile paper.)
• You won’t need to do the printing yourself but you are responsible for selecting or designing graphics that will be intelligible in this format.
• Individual Roman letters or Arabic numbers on tactile paper may be intelligible if they are large enough, use a simple font and are not too close to other content.
• Word and sentences in roman letters will not be intelligible on tactile paper and will need to be translated into Braille.
• Typically photographs are not suitable for printing.
• If a slide has a mixture of text blocks, figures and photographs, only the figures ought to be printed.

There several aspects of this which do involve the author of the slide show:

1. Getting the slide ready early enough so that other people can ensure that printed material is provided to the student before the lecture.
2. Efficiently identifying for the printing service those figures that need printing.
3. Verbally referencing the figures by name or number during the lecture so the student can find and examine the printed figure.
4. Ensuring that the PowerPoint file makes proper references to the figures so the student can listen to the slides after the lecture and simultaneously feel the diagrams.

Photographic Images

There is no way to print a tactile version of a photographic image and so it becomes important to describe them textually.  Instructions follow.

How to add descriptions to diagrams and photographic images

• If a graphic has no description then the student will not know it exists.
• It is important that if a graphic has multiple parts you group them first. See above.
• A description is added by right clicking on the graphic and choosing ‘View Alt Text’. (Alt is an abbreviation for Alternative.)
• In the dialog box select “Alt text”.
• An artificial intelligence generated description may be available – this will rarely work well because it only considers the photographic data and not the educational context.

What to put in the title and description for diagrams.

• Start the description with a title - put the same text that you used to label the figure for disability services.  E.g. 

“Figure 2.”

• Add a few descriptive words and state how the figure or the information in it will be provided to blind students. E.g.

“Figure 2. The various structures of Glucose in aqueous solution. Suitable for printing on tactile paper.”

Another example:

“Figure 27. A three dimensional graph showing how rate of oxygen consumption varies over time during different kinds of exercise. Unsuitable for printing on tactile paper. Please consult your personal tutor if you cannot access this figure visually.”

“Figure 32. A flow diagram with five boxes. There are arrows from box 1 to box 2, from box 2 to box 3 and so on and there is a long arrow from box 5 back to box 1.  The text of box 1 is…..”

What to put in the description of photos.

• Start the description with a title that is unique within the slide show. E.g.
  “Photo 7.”
• Add a description of the image and explain its educational purpose so the student can work out what study will be required to make up for the lack of accessibility of the image. E.g.

“Photo 7. This is an image of a patient consulting a dietician.  It serves to provide a focus for a class discussion about bedside manner, body language, tone of voice and so on.”

Another example.

“Photo 8. This is an electron microscope image of a typical human cell provided as a reminder of its general structure.  For a line art version of photo 8 with some internal structures labelled see figure 9.”

The titles and descriptions in the Alt text can be used by disability services and the student to help them identify, label and organise printed figures.

Students who use specialist keyboards and pointing devices

Some students are unable to operate the standard combination of mouse and keyboard and use alternate devices.  It would be unlikely for this to impact on the teacher’s use of PowerPoint.  However, if you use specialist plugins, scripting or programming tools to introduce interaction into your slides you need to ensure that the students can choose whether to use the keyboard or the mouse to interact with them.  Buttons that can only be operated with a mouse click might be unusable by a student who only has the ability to operate a keyboard.

Students with a combination of special needs

Some students may have a combination of different needs.  While it may be impossible to anticipate these needs while preparing PowerPoint presentations for the early weeks of the course, when no class list exists, you will be obliged to make reasonable adaptations once students have registered and their needs have been assessed.  It is therefore necessary to maintain good lines of communication with the students themselves and with disability services as the course progresses and consult with people who can help if the advice in this guide proves to be inadequate with respect to one or more of your students.

Students with changing needs

For many people disability arises from medical conditions that are subject to change.  For example, a student with multiple sclerosis may have perfect hearing one term and require a hearing aid in the next term.   More sudden and unexpected changes in needs may occur such as when a student is involved in a road traffic accident or suffers a stroke.

Consequently, a course team needs to communicate well with their students and adapt to special needs as they change.

Further Reading

JISC TechDis briefing on the Special Educational Needs, Disability Act: 

https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/have-you-seen-senda-2001-and-dda-1995-legislation-checklist-implications-further-and