Challenge 5: PowerPoint and Slide Decks
What are Accessible Digital Presentations?
Slide decks are a common part of teaching and learning. Whether you’re presenting in class, teaching online, or sharing slides with students after a lecture, your presentation should be designed so that everyone can access and navigate the information.
An accessible slide deck isn’t just one that is easy to see. It also needs to have an underlying structure that allows assistive technologies, such as screen readers, to interpret the content in a meaningful order.
For example, using built-in slide layouts and content placeholders helps screen readers understand the relationship between titles, text, and images. Simply placing text wherever you want it using text boxes can make the content more difficult for assistive technologies to interpret.
Accessibility also involves things that benefit everyone, such as readable text, sufficient colour contrast, clear slide titles, and avoiding unnecessary animations.
An accessible slide deck considers not only what your audience sees, but how they might experience and navigate your slides in different ways.
Why Does This Matter?
Imagine you’re sharing a slide presentation with your students.
One student is using a screen reader and needs to navigate the presentation without seeing the slides. Another has low vision and needs larger text and strong colour contrast. Another student may find rapidly moving animations distracting or uncomfortable.
If your slides rely heavily on visual design without providing an underlying structure, these students may have difficulty accessing the same information as their peers.
For students using screen readers, the order of content on a slide matters. If text, images, and other elements aren’t arranged in a logical reading order, the information may be announced in a confusing sequence.
Similarly, colour should not be the only way you communicate meaning, because people have different abilities to perceive and distinguish colours. High contrast also helps people with low vision read text more easily.
Making your slides accessible helps ensure that students can access the information you’re presenting, whether they’re viewing your slides in a classroom, accessing them online, or using assistive technology.
Examples
Try It Yourself!
Now it’s time to put these ideas into practice and check your own slide deck!
Step 1: Choose a Slide Deck
Open a PowerPoint or other slides-based presentation that you currently use with your students.
Step 2: Give It an Accessibility Check
Spend 10 to 15 minutes looking through your presentation.
Ask yourself:
- Are built-in slide layouts being used instead of text boxes?
- Does every slide have a clear, unique title?
- Is the text at least 24 pt and in an easy to read font?
- Is there sufficient contrast between text and the background?
- Is colour being used alongside another way of communicating information?
- Do meaningful images have alternative text?
- Are links descriptive?
- Are animations and transitions necessary and appropriate?
- Is the content on each slide arranged in a logical reading order?
- Have you run the accessibility checker?
Step 3: Make a Change
Choose at least one accessibility issue you’ve identified and fix it.
You might:
- change a slide to a built-in layout
- add a unique slide title
- increase the font size
- improve colour contrast
- add alt text to an image
- remove an unnecessary animation
- fix the reading order
- replace a vague link with descriptive link text
You don’t need to redesign your entire presentation. The goal is to identify one barrier and make one meaningful improvement.
Further Resources
Up Next
For our 6th and final challenge, we will be looking at how you can create accessible video-based content.
This challenge is adapted from the “BCcampus Accessibility Bites Series: PowerPoint Slides” by Josie Gray, used under CCBY 4.0
keith tyler
Added alt text to images but I was suprised to see how well the slides held up under scrutiny. The crackle silde check really helped
Caterina Valentino
Good day,
Thank you for the challenge. I took a different spin in the challenge.
I asked Gemini Flash to create a five slide presentation on the key points to remember when making accessible slides.
The presentation highlighted the points in the resources provided with the challenge.
Then I asked Gemini Flash to describe the accessibility weaknesses in the the presentation. Below is the output generated by Gemini.
While the presentation excels in typography, contrast, and visual clarity, there are several accessibility weaknesses and technical limitations under WCAG 2.1 guidelines when evaluated as an interactive HTML slide deck:
1. Fixed Container Dimensions & Zoom Restrictions (WCAG 1.4.4 & 1.4.10)
● The Issue: The slides use fixed dimensions (width: 1280px; height: 720px;) with overflow: hidden.
● Impact: If a user with low vision increases browser text size or applies 200%+ page zoom, the text will overflow the box and become clipped/unreadable because scrollbars are hidden.
2. Table Semantics Missing Header Scopes & Captions (WCAG 1.3.1)
● The Issue: On Slide 4, the element lacks:
○ Explicit scope=”col” attributes on elements.
○ A or aria-describedby attribute to announce the table’s purpose before entering data cells.
● Impact: Screen readers may not consistently announce column headers when a user navigates from cell to cell within the checklist.
3. Lack of Landmarks & ARIA Regions (WCAG 1.3.1 & 2.4.1)
● The Issue: Slides are built using generic tags rather than semantic HTML5 tags (, , or ).
● Impact: Screen reader users cannot quickly jump between slides using landmark navigation shortcuts unless slides are marked as or wrapped in a container.
4. Missing Keyboard Navigation Controls (WCAG 2.1.1)
● The Issue: There are no focusable controls (e.g., “Previous” / “Next” buttons, tab stops, or keyboard event listeners) to transition between slides.
● Impact: Keyboard-only users must rely on screen reader linear DOM navigation to move through the document rather than dedicated presentation controls.
5. Non-Semantic Cards/Grid Elements (WCAG 1.3.1)
● The Issue:
○ The 3 tiles on Slide 2 use blocks instead of an unordered list (/).
○ The 4 pillar items on Slide 5 (Perceivable, Operable, etc.) use generic elements inside containers.
● Impact: Screen readers will read these as disjointed text blocks rather than announcing them as a structured set of items (e.g., “List of 3 items”), losing contextual structure.
6. Alt Text Detail for Complex Graphics (WCAG 1.1.1)
● The Issue: On Slide 3, the image alt text is high-level (“Illustration representing digital accessibility…”), whereas the actual image displays specific, detailed infographics (the UK Home Office accessibility posters).
● Impact: Users who rely on screen readers miss out on the specific visual examples shown in the image illustration.
Here are the primary accessibility strengths of this presentation deck, evaluated against WCAG 2.1 AA design standards:
The creation of accessible slides requires considerable knowledge.
Regards,
Caterina
Linda O'Donoghue
Hello,
The accessibility checker was a great tool to utilize on a ppt I am offering in an upcoming workshop. I also appreciated the tips/guidelines to check a document for accessibility. Going forward, it will be much easier to create content in an accessible format rather than trying to ‘retrofit’ an existing ppt. Thank you for such a clear unit of learning!
Heather Mitchell
I decided to review a five-slide orientation deck for Accessibility Services. When I ran PowerPoint’s Accessibility Checker, it identified several changes needed: duplicate slide titles, missing alt text, and reading order.
On three slides, the duplicate title was simply “Accessibility Services,” the name of the service displayed at the top. Replacing it with a unique, descriptive title provides more meaningful orientation to the slide’s content, particularly for someone who cannot see or easily access the rest of the slide.
Janet
I used the Accessibility Checker on a PowerPoint I delivered for a session not long ago, and it was really interesting to see what it identified. Most of the issues were related to colour differentiation, which was a bit disappointing when you’re working within our institutional colour palette. Another was related to a slide with an image but no title. I hadn’t realized you could add a hidden title to a slide to make it more accessible without actually displaying the title on the slide. That was a cool discovery 🙂 I also really liked the ability to check the reading order and edit it within the Accessibility Checker. Being able to see how the content will be interpreted and then being able to fix it right there makes the whole process much more intuitive and efficient.
Tracy
The Accessibility Checker is an excellent reminder of what to do and how to make corrections to what I shouldn’t be doing! Found Alt Text missing in my presentation. While I do not have any videos embedded or linked in this presentation, I am aware that other presentations do have this. I am unsure how to add audio/video transcripts as suggested. If anyone has suggestions, I would be open to receiving them.
Further Resources with Queens University was an excellent source for me as I found it concise and easy to understand most of the suggestions they made. I have bookmarked this site.