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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

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