From pitching a big idea to live demonstrations to employee training, there are plenty of reasons to make a slideshow. Slideshows layout and breakdown large pieces of information into easily digestible slides for the audience to understand.
When putting together a presentation, consider these visual impairment facts in the United States from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
- About 12 million people 40 years and over have vision impairment
- 1 million are blind
- 3 million have vision impairment after correction
- 8 million have vision impairment due to uncorrected refractive error
These statistics account for a large part of the population, meaning there is a significant chance that someone on your staff, in your board meeting, etc., may have a vision impairment of some kind, including color blindness, blurred vision, cataracts, and more.
With that said, here are a few ways to make your slideshow digitally accessible to include everyone while getting your message across.
Be considerate of your font choice
If you’re presenting before an audience, choose a font size that can be seen from any part of the room. To be safe, the minimum font size should be 24 points.
While fancy script fonts may be tempting to use, the best practice is to choose simple sans-serif fonts since they are the easiest to read. Examples are Arial, Calibri, Lucida Sans, and Verdana.
Avoid italics and underlining as much as possible, as it is harder to read.
Make sure your layout is simple and concise
Regarding text, it’s best to limit the lines of text per slide for best readability and to avoid having a cluttered look. The “6 by 7” rule is usually standard, keeping it to six words per line with only seven lines in a slide.
For the overall design, be sure to choose a sufficient contrast layout. The maximum color contrast ratio is 21:1, and the lowest is 1:1 (to ensure your contrast choice is aligned, use a contrast checker).
It’s best to opt for an off-white/cream background since bright white can make the text more challenging to read. To accommodate this, go with dark text with adequate space around the letters — a dark background with white text is a good alternate choice.
A structured layout is best for those in the audience who live with dyslexia. Make sure to give every slide a title and use colons and heading styles to add clear outlining.
Break down the information with more than just text
Adding pictures, graphics, or other elements to break up text and give options for ways to view the information. Not only does it make your slideshow more accessible, but it also makes it more engaging overall. Additions like this should always include Alt Text, a meaningful description of the photo or graphic.
Include captions in all video and audio elements
Videos are a great way to engage with the audience. To include everyone, add captions to all videos. Captions are more than descriptions. It contains important cues to ensure that people with hearing disabilities can get the full content (ie; a knock at the door, the sound of whistling, etc.).
Add an audio track to video descriptions to make it accessible for those who are blind or have low vision.
Avoid animation and elaborate transitions
In theory, adding jazzy transitions sounds like a good idea but can cause more harm than good.
Things like animated transitions can distract your audience and interfere with screen readers by causing them to re-read slides or read them out of order. It also gives the audience less time to read slide content, resulting in missed information.
Include speaker notes
Give the option to further go through the information by including speaker notes. This allows the audience to refer to the notes to remember any verbal points made during the presentation.
Speaker notes should be in-depth and formatted in a sans-serif font (as mentioned above).
Save in an alternate format
Having the presentation available as a PDF, HTML, or document makes it more accessible to those with screen readers.
Put the presentation to the test
Once the presentation is complete, there’s an option to test it out before it’s shown to the audience. Try going through the slideshow using a screen reader like JAWS, NVDA, or others to see how it measures up. Some software, like Microsoft’s PowerPoint, have built-in accessibility features that allow testing.
For companies requiring extensive or consistent presentations, consider putting together a team of specialists in assistive technologies to ensure all presentations are accessible.
When creating presentations, you want to be sure to engage and include everyone in your audience so that everyone walks away with a clear understanding of the topic. By accounting for those with visual impairments, you’re ensuring that your messages get across in an accommodating way. Use this as a checklist for the next time you create a big external or internal presentation to show that you and your company are inclusive and considerate of everyone.
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