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Re: Creating a parallel PPT when the original is a mess??

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From: Mallory
Date: Jun 24, 2017 7:19AM

> "The only way I can think a PPT having thousands of layers, would be if each slide had its own look," /unquote

Animations are a big reason to have a bazillion layers on a single
slide. I mean normally there's only a few layers but sometimes they get
nuts.

We get those when textbook authors make animated charts and graphs with
accompanying equations. In remediation we're trying to group all those
hundreds of little bits into single objects, but we certainly receive
them with the Bazillion Layers of Death.

And because the stuff they're showing is complex data, one of our
recommendations to vendors doing remediation for us in the worse cases
is to have an accompanying HTML document with long descriptions and any
normally-accessible structures like complex tables (seriously,
Powerpoint tables suck and simply aren't very accessible. They're almost
a little bit usable with JAWS if you don't add alt text, but you've got
to add alt text (NVDA has a longstanding bug on PPTX tables) which JAWS
then seems to prefer instead of table navigation (which, again, is
almost okay but still mostly sucks and still works best in Edit Mode
where people have the perfect opportunity to accidentally edit the data
they're merely trying to read)).

Especially tables containing Math OLEs (written in MathType), images
(some of which would have long alts), and little line graphs. Making
these in PowerPoint is almost a waste of time, but someone somewhere
does it for a course and then if we honestly want to give students
usable and comprehensible data then an HTML document bundled with the
PPTX is the only sane thing to do at this point. At least until
Microsoft does some vast improvements in the future, for which I'm not
holding my breath.

Oh and I hate powerpoints. I would almost want to recommend Wolfram
notebook files except those aren't accessible either, but the code
behind them is at least sane.

cheers,
Mallory

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On
> > Behalf Of Ryan E. Benson
> > Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2017 3:42 PM
> > To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> > Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Creating a parallel PPT when the original is a mess??
> >
> > The answer is no not really, unless there is literally no other option.
> > The times when I get this argument is either the author doesn't
> > know/understand what needs to happen, or just doesn't want to make the
> > effort.
> >
> > I have been working at the federal level for 7 years, I can count the
> > number of videos I have seen in a PPT on one hand. For the videos, if
> > they're being embedded from say YouTube, you might want to put a link to
> > the video versus the embed. This gives the accessibility of YouTube, vs
> > the player is non-compliant in PPT - if I recall correctly.
> >
> > The only way I can think a PPT having thousands of layers, would be if
> > each slide had it's own look, or if the PPT was made in Office 2003 or
> > something. I would apply one of the stock themes. My hunch is, that may
> > solve a decent amount of issues. After that, look through for images and
> > such that can be grouped together.
> >
> > --
> > Ryan E. Benson
> >
> > On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 3:54 PM, Andrea Miralia <
> > <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > Can someone here remind me if it is 508-compliant to create a new,
> > > plain, PPT to accompany an original PPT that is too complex and
> > > problematic to make compliant?
> > >
> > > I've gotten the go-ahead to do this instead of trying to
> > > backwards-repair a crazy PPT with audio, MPGS, and thousands of layers.
> > >
> > >
> > > Andréa Miralia
> > > Signature Consulting Group