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Re: - Powerpoint Master slides and Accessible text

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From: Hayman, Douglass
Date: Mar 7, 2023 11:00AM

This might be a bit dated but check out:

https://www.washington.edu/accessibility/documents/powerpoint/

They have info on accessible PPT and also some templates to download. You could look and see what they did.

Doug Hayman
IT Accessibility Coordinator
Information Technology
Olympic College
<EMAIL REMOVED>
(360) 475-7632



-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Ilana Gordon
Sent: Tuesday, March 7, 2023 8:36 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [EXTERNAL] - [WebAIM] Powerpoint Master slides and Accessible text

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Hello gurus,

We're stuck on an issue with regard to how Powerpoint treats text and graphics on master pages.

*Question:* Is there a way to create a PowerPoint template that allows content to only read once and be immediately accessible on newly inserted slides?
*Context:* We've been asked to make an accessible PPT template, meaning that it's accessible both before use and after users have created a PPT from the template. The template is using master slides in order to have multiple layouts ready to add to the presentation, and we've made these as accessible as possible.
The issues are having everything available in the Selection Pane and/or Outline View (required by HHS standards) versus a) having things read multiple times or b) having to retype text in placeholders.
JAWS will read content in the slide master in its entirety before it reads anything from the slide instance itself; if a master slide is inheriting content from another master slide, it will read from the higher level master slide, then the lower level master slide, then the slide itself. So if there's a footer with 2 logos and a link that's been inherited from 2 levels of a slide master, it'll read the footer content 3 times, the first two times before everything on the main slide, which is not the desired reading order.
In order not to repeat, content would have to only be on the master slide or on the actual slide, not both. We tried doing this by using placeholders on the master slide, which would then make the actual content available on the slide itself, but that would require users to retype the text in the text placeholders, since they would actually be showing default/sample text before that. The same would probably be true of the logos, that they would have to be inserted by the user and then have alt-text applied, which is not their preferred solution.
If possible, we'd like to help our clients still be able to insert new slides, rather than copying and pasting pre-formatted compliant slides. Is there a way to do this that will both have all the content accessible and compliant while simultaneously not reading multiple copies of the content?

--
Ilana Gordon
CEO
Word Wizards, Inc
8609 2nd Avenue, Unit 406-B
Silver Spring, MD 20910
*v.*301-986-0808 *fax.*301-986-0809
*Direct: 240-380-2639*
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