PowerPoint Content Creation Features

Microsoft PowerPoint offers a variety of accessibility features to ensure presentations are inclusive for all users, including those with disabilities.

Adding alternate text (alt text) to images, charts, and other visual elements in PowerPoint is essential for making presentations accessible to individuals who use screen readers. Here's how to add and optimize alt text in PowerPoint:

Adding alternate text (alt text) to images, charts, and other visual elements in PowerPoint is essential for making presentations accessible to individuals who use screen readers.

Why Alt Text is Important

Alt text provides a textual description of visual elements, enabling screen readers to convey the purpose and content of the image to users who are visually impaired. Proper alt text helps everyone understand the content, even if they cannot see the visuals.

How to Add Alt Text in PowerPoint

Adding closed captions and subtitles to PowerPoint presentations is a great way to make them accessible to audiences who are deaf or hard of hearing or who speak a different language.

How to Add Captions and Subtitles to Presentations

High contrast in PowerPoint presentations is essential for making content more accessible, especially for individuals with visual impairments or color blindness. It ensures text, images, and other visual elements stand out clearly against the background.

How to Achieve High Contrast and Optimize your Presentation for Accessibility

For more in-depth details on these features on and how access them on your operating system please visit the Microsoft PowerPoint accessibility guide.

Creating accessible slide layouts and structure in PowerPoint ensures that everyone, including people with disabilities, can easily navigate and understand your presentation.

Creating Slide Layouts and Structure

Choosing the right fonts for accessible PowerPoint presentations ensures that your content is clear and easy to read for all viewers, including those with visual impairments or dyslexia.

How to Select Readable Fonts and Using Them Effectively

Adding descriptive hyperlinks in PowerPoint presentations improves accessibility by making it easier for screen readers and all users to understand the purpose of the link.

How to Create Accessible Hyperlink Descriptions

The accessibility checker in Office Products such as PowerPoint will identify some accessibility problems, such as inadequate color contrast, missing alt text for images, a lack of table headers, and restricted document access. The accessibility checker will designate each problem as an “error,” a “warning,” or a “tip,” with “errors” being the most severe problems and “tips” being the least severe. (The accessibility checker in Office will identify the absence of captions as a “tip,” but at UB, all audiovisual media must be captioned). The accessibility checker will also offer options for a way to fix problems. 

However, there are some accessibility problems an automated checker will fail to identify, and it is important to learn to identify them or to ask an expert to look over the document. For example, the accessibility checker will not identify if headings are assigned to the appropriate level, if text color or style is used exclusively to convey information, or if there are inaccuracies in alt text.