Accessibility in PowerPoint
To start checking accessibility in PowerPoint, go to File > Info > Check for Issues > Check Accessibility. This will open the Accessibility Pane, which will display all of the issues in the file. If you click on an issue to select it, it will take you to the place in the slideshow where the issue occurs, and will display a reason and potential fix for the issue in the Accessibility Pane. A list of common issues and how to fix them can be found on the Common Issues page.
One of the most important ideas in PowerPoint accessibility is ensuring that all slide content has a content block to hold it. Content blocks allow the structure and reading order of a slide to be properly understood by a screen reader. The Slide master is a powerful and necessary tool for modifying slide layouts to provide the required amount of content blocks or creating visual styles for the presentation without cluttering the slide with unreadable elements.
Much like video requires captions and/or transcripts, if your PowerPoint contains video or audio embedded media, it needs to be captioned. More details can be found on the Embedded media page.
People will commonly add animations to their slides. This doesn't necessarily cause an accessibility issue if it's purely aesthetic. However, if animations are used to convey information, they need to be refactored into an accessible format. More details are available on the Animations page.
The Formatting tools page shows how to use a variety of options in PowerPoint to remedy issues caused by poor formatting.
Tips for working in PowerPoint
- Do all your alt text at the end. As you go through and fix other issues, you may be changing what elements need alt text. For example, if you have a diagram made up of arrows and text boxes, you would end up either grouping all the elements together or saving it as an image and reinserting it. This would result in reducing the required alt text from all of those arrows and boxes to just the one description of the whole diagram.
- Everything on the slide should have a layout-defined place before it's added. See the Slide Master page for more information.
- Keep your slides as simple as possible. The more elements that are on a slide, the more difficult it is to ensure that it reads in a meaningful way. It's fine to make diagrams using the tools in PowerPoint, but when it's finished, select all of the elements, save it as an image, and replace it with the image. This takes your multi-element diagram and puts it into a single element that can easily have alt text applied.