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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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PubCom - Trainers, consultants, designers, and developers
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