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Re: PowerPoint Outline View- still necessary?

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From: Karlen Communications
Date: Aug 20, 2015 10:48AM

JAWS has been able to read the information in text boxes on a slide since about PowerPoint 2003, probably earlier but that is as far back as I can remember.

The problem arises when you have to provide a Braille or Large Print copy of a slide presentation and choose File, Save As, Outline (RTF) to create the text version of the slide presentation. Only the content you see in the Outline view is going to be saved in that Outline document. You will need to copy and paste anything in a text box from the PowerPoint to the Word document. Depending how many text boxes are on slides and in the PowerPoint, this can take a lot of time.

The accessible placeholders for slides are the Text and Content placeholders which you can add and resize/reformat in the Slide Master View. Text content added to those two types of placeholders on slides will show in the Outline view and be converted to text when you choose to save the presentation as an Outline/RTF.

There is a resource document on accessible PowerPoint placeholders on the Karlen Communications website: http://www.karlencommunications.com/handouts.html

The other issue is whether other adaptive technology reads the text box information on slides, in slide show mode or is converted to another format. Generally the Text and Content placeholders are the accessible text containers.

Cheers, Karen