 

Creating Accessible Presentations: Before, During, and After

Before

  • Illustrated woman presenting graphs and chartsIf you are the organizer, arrange for live captions.
    • Provide ASL interpreters on request.
  • Use good color contrast and large fonts in designing your slides.
    • Don’t cram too much text on a slide.
  • If your presentation includes video or audio clips, ensure they are accessible.
    • Provide captions (or a transcript for audio-only clips).
    • Provide audio description or summarize the video so blind attendees understand the content.

During

  • Speak descriptively.
    • Imagine you are speaking to someone who can't see your screen. What is important about your graphics?
    • No need to call out each image individually but be sure that the information they convey is included in your script.
  • Pace yourself
    • Interpreters need more time for translation, and other attendees appreciate it too.
    • Leave time for questions, if that fits the format.
    • Practice your presentation so you know how long it takes at a reasonable speaking speed.
  • Explain acronyms if the audience is general.
    • Keep jargon to a minimum, unless the event is for specialists.

After

  • If you are sharing the presentation video, make sure the captions are included.
  • If you are sharing the slides, consult accessibility tips for documents. 
  • PowerPoint and PDF can be made accessible; see resources below.
  • Consider using HTML which can be made highly accessible; see resources below.

Resources

Accessible Documents

Color Contrast Tools

Image Description Resources

 

 

Printable (PDF) Version of Tip Sheet

Developed in conjunction with the National Center for Accessible Media, based at Boston public broadcaster WGBH. NCAM WGBH logo

 
https://accessate.net/tipsheet/creating-accessible-presentations
accessate.net
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-27
17235
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:TDNBCPEYFK3XVHCG2Y4U426ATYBPARBE
<urn:uuid:412a1cf7-fbba-45f4-9d10-a3892ad5fdb8>
2022-07-04T15:55:13Z
144.92.170.202
text/html
sha1:5BI5LHCK6KP7AG3OOP6KLHQWOXZQYJWN
<urn:uuid:db5d3245-93c3-43fd-9f31-db1a55fd8b99>
https://accessate.net/tipsheet/creating-accessible-presentations
response
<urn:uuid:cd6a6237-602c-476c-8ca4-3fda73c92bbe>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-27
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June/July 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-163
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.3-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/