Title: Guidelines for Accessible MS PowerPoint presentations
Course: Web Accessibility MOOC for Educators > Section: Creating Accessible MSOffice and PDF Materials

Microsoft Office PowerPoint is a presentation development application used in business and educational settings to create slide-based complements to presentations. The versatility of this slide show tool allows for the creation of highly customizable live and web presentations, handouts, and outlines. This page offers guidance on ways to create Microsoft PowerPoint presentations to make them more accessible to users with disabilities.

Accessibility Barriers

- Screen reader users will not be able to access content within a text box.
- Information presented as an image, animation, or video will be inaccessible to screen reader users when alternative text is not included.
- Slides that use low contrast or patterned backgrounds will be inaccessible to low vision users.
- Slide transitions and animations that require a mouse click may also result in inaccessible presentations, particularly for users who are blind or have mobility impairments.
- Screen readers read containers within a slide in the order that they were created and not in the order they appear.
- Animations and slide transitions may cause screen readers to re-read slides.
- Automatic slide transitions may not give users enough time to read slide content.
- Speech recognition software is not fully compatible with PowerPoint, as PowerPoint does not support the Text Services Framework (TSF).
- Speech recognition software will cause a video playing in a slide show to freeze.

Best Practices

Just a tip:  When creating PowerPoints that will be used for video lectures, leave space at the bottom of the PowerPoint for closed captions otherwise the closed captions will overlay on top of the conent within the slides.

Structure

- Use unique heading titles for each slide.
- Text included on slides should be included in the outline.
- Use pre-defined PowerPoint slide templates rather than creating custom templates.

Images

- Charts, tables, and graphs should be inserted by selecting the appropriate slide layout or using the Insert menu.
- Include alt text for images.
- Include extended descriptions for charts and other graphics intended to convey information.

Content

- Use sans-serif fonts.
- Use appropriate punctuation at the end of each bullet point.
- Avoid using text boxes not in a pre-defined template.
  - Adaptive technology may interpret text boxes as inaccessible graphical elements.
  - screen readers will read text in the order created, not in the order in which it appears.
- Use a color scheme that presents a sharp contrast between text and background.
- Caption embedded video.

Additional Information

Creating accessible PowerPoint presentations