Getting Microsoft Power Point right the first time - details
[Why?]
[How?]
Why?
- In isolation of a classroom setting where the instructor tells anecdotal examples of the points, provides case study demonstrations or walks students through problem based learning activities, a slide presentaion becomes meaningless.
- Limits the ability to display content on specific devices with specific system resources which pre-empts the use of palm devices, cell phones and other portable tools students might use.
- Browsers display them differently, if they are converted to HTML, and this is often displayed differently depending on the Browser as well.
- Some screen readers can read PowerPoint slides on the Web to some degree, but not well enough to be considered truly ?ssible.".
- Those who are deaf will be able to access the slides without any problems, unless there is embedded multimedia (e.g. streaming video that presents images and uses speech).
How?
1. Open your Microsoft Power Point program.
2. When the dialogue box Creating a new presentation using… comes up, choose blank presentation and select OK (figure 1)
Figure 1 : Pop up window giving you options for presentation format
3. In Choose an AutoLayout (figure 2), choose the third auto layout of the third line. This auto layout is a blank slide with only a header. Select OK.
Figure 2: "New Slide" window showing the options for auto layout format for a new PowerPoint presentation
Within PowerPoint there are different views. For making accessible presentations, the Normal View icon located at the bottom left of the screen should be always used. (figure 3)
Remember: By choosing one of the auto layouts (with the exception of the blank page), you will automatically generate an outline of the slide. The text you enter directly in the slide will appear automatically in the outline, too.
4. For creating an accessible presentation, select the Normal View icon located at the bottom left of the screen (figure 3), or select Normal from the View menu.
Figure 3: Location of normal view icon
This will show three pane areas: the outline pane, the slide pane and the notes pane. (figure 4)
Figure 4: The three sections of a PowerPoint slide: outline pane, slide and notes pane.
5. Type the text in the Click to add title area of the slide, and confirm that it is also displayed in the outline section.
Make sure your slide isn't crowded, for sound design and for visual clearness.
If images, diagrams, charts, and tables are used on the slide, descriptive text can be added in the notes pane section. Decorative images don't need to be described however, if it is a logo, let the user know what the logo is .
1. Go to the Notes Pane.
2. Clearly convey what you wish the user to understand about the image.
Figure 5: PowerPoint slide that shows: text and 1 graphic in slide, text in outline section and notes in the notes pane area
Figure 5 shows an accessible slide containing an image and some text seen in a Normal View you can observe that:
· the slide shows all the information on the slide,
· the outline shows only the text information of your slide.
· written notes in the notes pane describe the image contained on this slide.
Note: When using PowerPoint presentations:
- Use Microsoft's Design Templates , using colours with enough contrast so students with colour blindness or low vision are able to adequately access all of the information within the presentation.
- Use sans-serif font for your presentations, such as Arial . Using fonts such as Times New Roman creates false cues for people with low vision, creating confusion in the correct identification of letters.
- For sound design and visual clarity, don't clutter the slides with too much text.
- Avoid adding text-boxes - use the set PowerPoint layouts ( autolayout/slide layout ) for your text. The text entered also appears to the left of your slide, in Normal view.
- Thus, ensure that all the text is visible in the left column ( Outline view) when in normal view .
- Else, add a hidden slide containing the text-box text ( Slide Show - Hide Slide) .
- Use the Notes Pane to describe graphs, diagrams or images.
- Do not save as HTML without using the Office Accessibility Wizard. (see below)
Save a text only version of the PowerPoint file - so that it can be viewed as a text only summary
(Save As Outline/rtf) and link to this in the Table of Contents. Consider converting to htm format.
In PowerPoint, select File - Save as and in the Save as type choose Outline/RTF(*.rtf) at the bottom of the Save as box
Send the PPT file to Word - so that the slides are displayed as handouts for printing and link to the Word file in the Table of Contents (this does not decrease the file size).
- In PowerPoint, use File - Send to - Microsoft Word .
- In the Write-Up window, choose Blank lines next to Slides then OK .
- Save the resulting Word document. It can then be printed as a handout.
NB This creates a large file. ... can create an acrobat (pdf) file for you that can be printed.
Consider putting up lecture notes or summaries rather than PowerPoint slides
If your PowerPoint has a lot of text... save as rich text and use the rich text file.
Publishing PowerPoint Presentations on the Web Using the conversion program called Office Accessibility Wizard
The easiest way to make your presentation accessible all web users is to download a software plug-in designed by the University of Illinois called the Web Publishing Accessibility Wizard. The Wizard allows you to easily develop three different versions of your PowerPoint presentations - a text-only version, a text with minimal graphics version and a text with full graphics version - that can be perceived by all users in any browser. The final product is a web page you can publish to the internet - without any prior knowledge of how to create a web page!
The Web Accessibility Wizard plug-in is available here (29mb) (http://www.rehab.uiuc.edu/office). After you install it in your computer, it will add a "Save as an accessible web page" option under the File menu of your PowerPoint program. Install the program yourself; if you cannot download the program, you may need to ask for assistance from your System Administrator.
Note: while this program makes PowerPoint presentations accessible on the web, it will not make the original PowerPoint presentation you develop accessible in itself as a presentation.
- Ensure the Web Accessibility Wizard has been installed on your computer.
- Open Microsoft PowerPoint.
- Open the presentation you want to work with.
- Under the File menu, select Save as Accessible Web Page option.
- Follow the prompts...
Abandoning PowerPoint
Alternatively, you could abandon PowerPoint altogether, and use HTML-based slide programmes instead. When using programmes such as the Slidemaker and WimpyPoint, you don't have to make alternate versions of any of your presentations, only having to ensure that you add all of the appropriate alt text for images and so on. Slidemaker has the advantage of offering built-in keyboard shortcuts and customizable style sheets that you can change on the fly during presentations.
Most of the slide shows that people have created using these tools are nothing more than a heading at the top with some bullets beneath it, however, if you insert your own style sheet (including background image, if you like), illustrations and formatting, your slides can be as creative as you can imagine.
Here are the links to the Slidemaker and WimpyPoint Web sites, where you can read about the tools and see examples of presentations created by others:
[Slidemaker] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/slidemaker)
[WimpyPoint] http://openacs.org/wp)