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Re: PowerPoint Accessibility Question?

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From: Bevi Chagnon
Date: Jun 5, 2012 1:53PM

When I teach MS Office, my section on making accessible PPTs and PDFs is
about 20-30 minutes long.
It's that easy once you know what to do.

1) Use PowerPoint's built in templates.
2) Use the template's slide title placeholder because that translates to a
heading tag in the PDF.
3) Use the template's text, table, and graphic placeholders and they too
will be translated in the correct tags in PDF.
4) Do not add "loose" text and graphic boxes onto an existing slide. These
added items will not be accessible in the PDF (nor in the PPT). Instead,
create or alter an existing slide master and use it to create the slide.
Items on the slide masters are accessible: items added loose to a slide are
not accessible.
5) Add Alt-Text and Actual-Text to graphics as needed, using the same
process as in Word.

Not tough to do. The only drawback I've seen is that we don't have the
ability to create various levels of Headings within a slide, so I think
navigation is not as good as it could be. But then again, these are slides
and the information on each slide should be short, rarely needing secondary
levels of headings.

--Bevi
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Bevi Chagnon | <EMAIL REMOVED>
PubCom - Trainers, consultants, designers, and developers
Print | Web | Acrobat | XML | eBooks | Section 508
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-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Mike Moore
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2012 3:40 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] PowerPoint Accessibility Question?

Actually the conversion from PPT to PDF is pretty simple and easy to clean
up in Acrobat Pro. I have to admit that I have not tested PDF on Lion with
voice over but it does work well on win 7 with JAWS.

Sent from my iPad
Mike

On Jun 5, 2012, at 11:52 AM, "Paul J. Adam" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Good recommendation Mike. I've used LecShare before on WindowsXP and it
worked well. I was going to try it on Lion to test a PPT for accessibility.
It does a good quick automated test. It does not work on Lion though and
when I tried on Windows 7 I kept getting error messages. I'd recommend other
people try it though for quickly testing and fixing PPTs.
>
> I like Jared's recommendation: "Use anything other than PowerPoint"! If
you want Universal Accessibility then HTML is the only way to go. Fixing it
in Adobe Acrobat sounds like a pain.
>
>
> Paul J. Adam
> Accessibility Evangelist
> Deque Systems
> <EMAIL REMOVED>
> www.PaulJAdam.com
> @pauljadam on Twitter
>
> On Jun 5, 2012, at 11:40 AM, Mike Moore wrote:
>
>> For conversion of PowerPoint to HTML I recommend looking into LecShare.
www.lecshare.com. The software is easy to use and inexpensive, $20 US or
free depending on the features that you need.
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>> Mike
>>
>> On Jun 1, 2012, at 5:43 PM, "Ryan E. Benson" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:
>>
>>> I agree with Jared. At work we allow PPT files that are accessible
>>> to be posted internally because we know all computers have Office.
>>> However for external files, the PPT must have a HTML/PDF version
>>> along side of them. A plain text or a Word version is not suitable
>>> for an alternate version in our view.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Ryan E. Benson
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Jared Smith < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>>>> By my understanding, your summary of PPT accessibility is spot on.
>>>> Because WebAIM (and prefereably this list content) is focused on
>>>> *web* accessibility, for presentation content online, we first
>>>> recommend to use about anything other than PowerPoint, but when
>>>> PowerPoint must be used, typically exporting it to PDF and fixing
>>>> accessibility issues in the PDF provides a much more accessible
experience.
>>>>
>>>> Jared
>>>> >>>> >>>> list messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
>>> >>> >>> list messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
>> >> >> list messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
>
> > > list messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>