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Re: Question: How to convert a PowerPoint into an accessible page?

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From: Jonathan Metz
Date: Jul 14, 2014 11:50AM

On 7/14/14, 10:39 AM, "John E Brandt" wrote:

>Why bother sharing a PowerPoint presentation in any format other than as
>the original PPT file?

Many clients request presentations in an accessible format in addition to
receiving a PowerPoint (PPT) file. The idea, in my opinion, is that if you
are going to post something that is inaccessible, you must provide
something that is an equivalent accessible alternative.

A lot of clients prefer an accessible format even when they aren't posting
one online. So the obvious question is, why would we create an alternate
version knowing that internal clients would need PowerPoint in order to
open a dot-PPT file in the first place.

I agree with an argument that the a presentation would really only help
people make edits to them in PowerPoint. The problem is that not many
people REALLY understand how to use the software. As Whitney astutely
pointed out back in May,
(http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_message?id%747), if everyone used
software — and formatted documents — correctly and followed some basic
best practices for accessibility, "it wouldn't take more than an
inter-office memo to teach the additions for accessibility."

That said, the nature of using PowerPoint is still really frustrating
even for people who do everything correctly. For example, let's take Smart
Art: JAWS can access Smart Art, but it's insanely annoying to do so
(https://www.mail-archive.com/ <EMAIL REMOVED> /msg54399.html)
. I can imagine that someone who requires assistive technology for
navigating a PPT slide is like navigating objects in a room under water.

Providing an accessible format so it can provide a means to understand
what the presentation would look like so the user can make the changes
they need to. The problem would be to convey the information in an
*equivalently* semantically structured format that would correlate
logically to the PowerPoint file.

IMHO…

I think this is one area that a properly tagged and formatted PDF excels
over HTML, because the presentation of the original document is identical
and provides a way to identify a logical structure. There are other
benefits too:

1. PDFs would be able to identify what you would need to edit offline.
2. incompatibility issues, Software trouble, etc, occur, so PDFs can also
be displayed like a presentation too just in case.
3. When you export the PDF from PPT, usually you're just correcting tags.
When you export to HTML from PPT 2010 you're — Wait... You can't export to
HTML from PPT 2010.
4. You can export from PPT to PDF directly from Office 2010.

/rant


>A well-constructed set of presentation slides should only seek to
>illustrate
>and amplify the presenters words - not replace them; providing a visual
>representation that attenuates the spoken word. Think Steve Jobs - single
>words, pithy phrases, lots of images.

This is kind of off topic, but I disagree. I believe in certain
circumstances like marketing a product or showing off a tool, this makes
the most sense, but if you are doing something like explaining complex
theses or teaching innovations of surgical incisions within abdomenal
aorta regions, this sort of approach doesn't work real well.

Instead, I believe it's important to "design presentations according to
your audience."

Cheers,
Jon