Okay. Hello, everyone my name is Marisol Miranda from EASI equal access to software and information and I want to welcome everyone to the presentation on creating more attractive and accessible PowerPoint presentations. Today's presenter is Norm Coombs, CEO of EASI. Hi, Norm.

   Hi, Marisol. Hi, everyone, thanks for coming. Give me a second I'm going to lock the mic so I can have my hands to do other things. Okay. I guess it is locked and we are working. Let me just make a few comments about things that are coming in the coming weeks and months. We have another webinar series in February. One I'm looking forward to about cascading style sheets. I don't know much about them. I use them, but I'm mainly using one that somebody else has written and I just copy them so Karen McCall who's been one of our best presenters is going to talk about cascading style sheets it's going to be a little technical but she's good at that and she's actually set up a discussion board because she thought people might very much have questions between webinars. If you go to the top of the page easi.cc another one I'm excited about is one of our free webinars on in February. That is on the mainstream E-readers. Some of you've seen Daisy readers on their computer where I have one in my pocket and we can read Daisy books and other things and we are all aware of the E-readers out there but the most common one is the Kindle and that has been a great help for people with learning disabilities but it hasn't been very useful for blind people. It could read the text of the book, it was no way for the point person to navigate around the Kindle to find the book or to skip between and other things. But if there's a lot happening to try to make these mainstream E-readers more accessible. Two things that I learned about. One is that I understand Kindle does have a software version of the Kindle you can download that on your computer and supposedly there's a free accessibility adding. And that works. I haven't tried it. The other one I have tried is (BLIO), B as in boy (BLIO). You can download the software for free and download on your computer an with a whole bunch of books that they have available. Several thousand. Some are free. Others are commercial books you can download them and they read quite well for someone who is blind using (BLIO) I hope and my question is this is the tip of the iceberg I'm very excited and hopeful for what may be happening. So I urge you to come to the February 9 free webinar on E-Books. Even if you are not going to need one you need to know about them for your friends.  The series we are on today is on accessible, making PowerPoint more accessible. So, first, week one we are learning the power and feature of PowerPoint itself, essentially a basic introduction to the software and for many of you it may be highly redundant. For others it may be a problem. If there's anybody here who wants me to talk about shortcut keys for people who are blind using PowerPoint as an authoring tool, put it in the text box and Marisol can tell me about it and I will try to remember to do that. So we are basically going to do a simple introduction to PowerPoint. Next week we will go on to talk about accessibility features in PowerPoint. The week after that about how to distribute PowerPoint. You can't give someone your PPT file. You can take PowerPoint into a lecture hall and have it displayed on the screen behind you while you talk. You can change it into webpages, change it into a PDF file bunch of different things you can do with it. You can distribute it in different ways. And bad points on each of them partly depending on your PowerPoint who you are giving it to and why and all those kinds of things. We will be talking more about that in week three mainly focusing on a wizard that I love that will help you take PowerPoint and change it into webpages. Actually when you look at the webpages in a room here those PowerPoint slides that I ran through the Wizard this is what the output looks like. And last week we are going to talk about. It PowerPoint and various versions including even making a video out of it. There's what we are going to do over the next four weeks. Today we are going to look at PowerPoint basics. What is PowerPoint good for, planning the content in advance, planning the display of the slide in advance, where it will be delivered and to whom is a question of touch already. Selecting PowerPoint options. Explaining the PowerPoint views or ribbons, playing with ribbons, connecting the slide layout, and that is basically what we are going to cover today. So, the next slide says what is it good for. Essentially PowerPoint is a modern technological advancement builds on the kind of thing the some of us who are a little older may have experienced years ago when you would be in a classroom or even a lecture hall someplace and the person up front has a blackboard behind that and they turned around and ran the blackboard or write on the blackboard or various things and give you a visual item to look at that would support, that would support their verbal presentation. A few years later along came the overhead projector where you could put information on to a piece of paper, run it through a machine that would spit out an overhead slide, put it on the projector and that would be projected on the screen behind the presenter a little more like what we do with PowerPoint today and now with the computer we now have a presentation tool called PowerPoint and I think Mac and some other things something like it that goes by a different name and functions pretty much the same so it is intended as a support to a presentation. Often times at a presentation where you go and you have a PowerPoint happened you go in and they will give you a piece of paper that has pictures of the slides there may be several pages in room for you to sprinkle scribble notes on them. Handouts that show the pictures and room to write. But for the most part the way that PowerPoint was intended to be used, what you have, slides or on the outline, the handout is basically an outline of talking points. Or a graphic that supports the talking. It is not the presentation itself. Sometimes people if you want to know some information on the topic that they are expert on they've given a presentation on it, they have the PowerPoint, they hand you the PowerPoint and typically it is a bunch of bullets and unless you are pretty familiar with the topic and get understand it and fill in the blanks it is not all that much help. It is not the presentation itself. So it is meant as a support tool. Very useful for a support tool that some people try and use it for other things. So the next slide is select the right tool for the job. I've seen people provide an electronic PowerPoint presentation, give it to you on a disk and each slide is a page that's part of the course syllabus. So the slides have text on them. Like the text you would have on a piece of paper. And it is not meant to support the presentation. It's basic information itself. And maybe a nice (inaudible)  back and forward but there are so many things you can do if you in a PowerPoint document they are really not using the right tool for the job. In a course syllabus you really want to write a word and give somebody the electronic Word document, that's just fine. I hope my wife answers that. Good, she did. One of the things that I've had happened to me many years ago I had some interaction with an accountant and he sent me an electronic message basically it was a letter and he wrote the letter inside Excel. I gather he got it so that there weren't any lines demarcating the cells so he was using three was using the cells to layout the letter of the pages together for someone with eyesight it wasn't so bad. For me as a blind reader JAWS reads the Excel one cell at a time. And if you have to be jumping cell to cell to have to find the text of the letter was totally confusing and I finally wrote back to him, send it to me as a word processing document and he said well, he's never used a word processor. But he was using the wrong tool for the job. So I really urge you to think of PowerPoint as a support tool. To put in bullets for your talks so if the person's mind wanders they can come back and have something to help them while you are talking around about a subject it will help highlight the main points so if you wander off the topic they can still see where you should have been and help them to get back in if you forget what you are talking about it helps you to get back. So, don't use it as the presentation, but use it as a support to the presentation. So that being said, the first thing you should do is blame the content in advance. This is elementary. School information I've got to confess oftentimes when I'm doing a PowerPoint I plugged the software, jumpy and and start writing ideas off the top of my head and I'm not very thoughtful or organized. Or have any overall idea of what I want to say or how to organize it. I try to organize as I'm going along and do it by the seat of my pants. So there are lots of times most of us to do things the right way and we could get by doing that and it's not a problem, but still the experts would say you really need to sit down and think about what you are saying. I go to church a lot. And sit through many sermons. And I've been through many sermons where the minister talked all over the map about this that and the other thing and that's what I call a shotgun approach. With no clear focus. One eye about it might have been interesting and is expiring but 5 min. later I don't know what he was talking about. So I believe in having a focus. I try to do it myself if I'm doing a PowerPoint by the seat of my pants I try to have that in the back of my mind. So I have a focus, clear focus. I'm assuming talking to a group of educated communicators with therefore we're using a presentation to communicate. If you are using it to entertain you may do the whole thing in an entirely different way but if you are wanting to communicate you really need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to say not just talk about the topic but know what you want to say about the topic. So, have a focus. And then you need to break it down into logical segments. And if you've got 15 subtopics you have got it organized very well. If you go through those 15 subjects, think about them, you probably can say four or five of them are irrelevant and you throw them out, others you can probably organize into groupings, so shoot for having three, four, five subtopics under your main focus. And one of the best preachers I ever heard was an extremely knowledgeable man with lots of information, lots of experience, lots to say told me one time, the best thing about assessment is what he left out. Because I knew that he kept it all kinds of fascinating things you'd love to tell us, fascinating things that are important, but that they didn't really contribute to the point he was trying to make. So the fact that he shot with a sniper's rifle, aimed at the focus rather than a scattergun, I remember during the Vietnam War one time hearing that I think we were using an average of 1500 bullets to kill an enemy. And I thought my gosh, I'm blind, and I bet I could shoot better than that. But then I understand what happened is you jump out of a helicopter, you land in a clearing and you don't know if there's anybody there or where they are and you just spin around a 360 circle and shoot like crazy. Use it as a shield rather than trying to hit a target. So what I'm going to focus on houses if we think of more as a sniper. Have a target in mind and try to aim and focus on it. And in the process try to keep it simple. So plan in advance. And yes, you can change and modify as you go along but the more you have a clear idea of what you want to say and break it into small parts, better if what you are going to do (inaudible)  how to use a PowerPoint software but I think to make a good PowerPoint presentation you need to have this kind of stuff in the background. So one of the things that I would emphasize in the next slide is to use skillful repetition my professor when I was in graduate school was a great lecturer and I was one of his assistants so I sat in on many of his lectures to freshman. And what he tried to teach us the students as we were training to become teachers is that when you are giving a lecture you tell them what you're going to tell them and then you tell them, and then you tell them and you tell them what you told them. Now that sounds insulting and the simplistic, but I think it is extremely important as I try to remember to do it. Sometimes I forget. But it's like going on a trip. Oftentimes when I go on a trip with my wife she will pull out the map and she will read to me what streets we go on, which we returned and sometimes I take braille notes on it. But having the picture of the whole trip in mind I found very helpful and useful, and I could help her in that respect. I know we'd be flying down the freeway and hard for her to watch the traffic and read all the signs and so sometimes she would miss where she was to turn or be worried about whether this was the right turn coming up or not, so what we did is we would look on the highway map, locate the name of the street before the one we wanted to turn on so when she told me we came to that street-say though we should have turned there, instead I said okay the next one is the one we want to turn on and it helped us to function more smoothly as we had the whole picture and fitted what we were doing into the picture. Now my daughter has a GPS. I guess you can put in, even on the long trip, where you want to go, and it will tell you to start out on such a such a Street and turn right and turn left and then go straight ahead for maybe 50 miles then suddenly it will tell you to turn right. If you haven't looked at the whole map you don't know whether you are almost at your destination or whether you have 200 more miles to go. So that telling them what you are going to tell them gives them an overview, gives them a roadmap and I find this important for me to understand things. I suppose you could just follow your GPS one that says ding ding turn right, ding ding, turn left. You may not know where you are going and how to get there but I like to have the whole picture. Then if you tell them what it is they can fit any particular item that you are telling them into the big picture and then at the end you can take a minute or two to give him a quick reminder of the whole thing. So, aside from telling them what you're going to tell them, telling them and telling them what you told them you need to think about your slides, your display in advance. That may vary throughout all presentation, different slides you may need a slightly different display on, but you need to first of all try to get some general concept of what kind of display you want to have. And we'll be talking next week about choosing themes, foreground, background, color, size, font, type of font. Those types of things. But you need to have the general look and feel that you choose for the whole thing and then you may need to change that for some specific reason somewhere as you are going along. But, again you need to do that thoughtfully. And part of what you need to keep in mind as you design each slide is to make it easy for the person to read and understand. Sometimes you can go to a webpage and it may be densely packed with information and you may need to stop and think and look and read to try to see what you're being told. I think particularly for PowerPoint you want the message of the slide it to be something somebody can see at a glance pretty much. Particularly for people in your audience who have visual or cognitive processing problems. It dyslexia, people with dyslexia oftentimes like to blow off a slide and move most the text off of it so they only see a little piece at a time. So don't back it densely. That could be important for everyone. If you are in a lecture hall remember some people maybe 30 or 40 yards back in the room. And it in order to see the slight it may have to be bending their head around to look past the somebody else's head. So try to keep the slides a simple and I guess what we usually say is try to leave white space. I don't know whether that is the term or not because often times the background may be queen or something else and there may be no white space, but leave spaces without pictures or text on it. I can't, I can't speak from experience that because I'm blind, but you can follow if something if there are blank spaces for your eye to rest instead of it being busy all the time. So you've got to think about orderly, logical, organized content. You've got to think about the slide in which the content is laid out in an orderly, simplified way and it's not too dense and not too crowded. We will talk next week about images but we will talk more about it next week I've been talking mainly about textbook accessibility doesn't mean using no images. In fact if you have people with disabilities in your audience who are deaf, people in your audience with disabilities of attention deficit disorder, dyslexia, maybe cognitive processing disabilities they may learn better from visuals that they do from text. So don't jump to the conclusion that you can't use images. Images are important for everyone but they are important for some people with disabilities as well. Using images can be part of making your presentation accessible to somebody with disabilities. So don't jump to that extreme. One of the things I think that's important in using that image is you make some way to convey to the audience what the image is therefore. What does it mean? One of the things I find hardest in writing a document or anything of that kind is I know what I mean and so I tend to think that what I say is what I mean and that it's obvious because it is obvious to me and if it's not obvious to you then that means you are dumb. And that's not true. Because my mind may connect A and B there may be no reason for your mind to connect A and B so if I'm connecting them sometimes I need to have some kind of transition or bridge that will help you get from A to B and see the connection that I think it's easier for a picture to be dropped in and assume that it means something to you and it's going to meet the same thing to the audience and it may not. You may need to explain what it's there for and what should they get out of it the same kind of thing goes not just for pictures but for lots of things in a written document. I had a student one time turn in an exam in which she paraphrased a lot of things out of my lectures and out of the book. And it was just kind of string together. In the context it wasn't bad for her to have copied and put it in there. That was quite legitimate. It was a paper, not an exam and she did say where they came from, so it wasn't cheating in that sense, (inaudible) criticized, I said now I know what this quote means to me I think I know what it means to the author, I have no idea what it means to you. Maybe you just copy things you thought were important and stuck them together without understanding them so I need you to give me some bridge that will help me follow your thinking rather than just putting together a jumble of things. So it is important that you be sure particularly with a picture, again not just for people with disabilities, that the reader is going to know, where the viewer is going to know what's it therefore, what should they be getting out of it. Next week we will be looking at adding alternate text images. I won't bother with that today but certainly for someone using a screen reader need not only help them what the picture is there for but what the picture is, picture of Norm Coombs, or something of that kind so the alt text is important and we will talk about that next week. The same thing with adding audio and video. You need to be sure that the audience is able to understand what it's there for, what they will learn from it you may need to do things like putting captions or transcription in error as well. When you add anything to a slide show you need to be sure that the audience is going to understand what it's there for and what they are to get out of it. So the next slide comments on the importance of knowing where you are going to deliver isn't going to hear the alt text tag because he is not really on his computer so that often times in the lecture hall you have. In another where you are not there you have to build it into the software presentation to whom and in what format. We will be talking about that more next week. Where I taught in Rochester for several years we had 1000 deaf students on campus and every time I walked in a classroom I had to be careful not to trip over the feet of the sign interpreters sitting at the front of the room certainly knew there were going to be deaf students there so we had an interpreter who was going to sign. I had a lot of deaf students in my classes. I wasn't always sure why. I thought having a lot of deaf students with a blinding teachers seemed to be having complications rather than simplifying it. But the interpreting service people told me that I talked a little slower than most teachers and that most of the time I talk in complete sentences and that was a great advantage for the interpreter and for the deaf student. So, those kinds of things can be important I also showed some videos and we had them captioned for the deaf students in the class and an interesting thing in case I don't mention it next week is that we found that students who had no disability cricketing information into sensory modes. They could read it and they could hear it. I'm getting dual sensory input for the information increase their learning ability, so students without disabilities tended to do better tended to do better. If you are presenting a PowerPoint and a PowerPoint to a lecture hall having captions on it, streaming captions will not mean much. If you have deaf people there you may need to have a signed interpreter. If you have pictures in your slides and you have alt text on it and you are in a lecture hall We willtalk about that again next week but where you are doing it may impact a bit of what you are doing and knowing a bit about your audience may impact how you organize the presentation as well. Though there isn't PowerPoint to think of options and you may want to think about options in the next slide talks about that. There are several things you can choose between there's long The proofing, save, typography, language, advanced, customized ribbons, quick access toolbar, add-ins, trust a center most of those I've never had any interest in, never had much to do about under Gen. there is a place where you can put your name and initials so that will be added to your PowerPoint as meta-data, or maybe you are using a public computer and maybe should be personalizing and respect. For me the most important one is safe. Sometimes I'm doing is doing work on a computer and I save it and I say whoops, where did I see fit. There's times when it's been lost and I never found it. You can decide to have your PowerPoint automatically saved in some particular place. Probably the default setting is what you will need. But even if you do at least you will know where to go to find it. I just noticed that time is running away from me. So getting started essentially what I'm doing mine I find that I'm working with two things, one there is a workspace and secondly there are placeholders for subtitles or title and objectives for content. The other thing that I like to have their is the thumbnails because what you can do with thumbnails is go in and click delete one slide, or you can cut and paste it somewhere else and shuffle the slides around a new slide, for me if I'm in the middle of the presentation and I want to go to a slide I go to M as in other. You probably have a different in different order. I often find that I have different order than I do and that's useful (inaudible)  so we will quickly look through that ribbons. There are several of them. First one we are going to look at is the home ribbon. It, like all the ribbons has several groups of commands. This is one of the places I go for commands very frequently on the home ribbon. There are basic things like cut and paste Then you can also select different slide layouts. We will look at that in a few minutes. You can set your font, your font type, your font size. Alignment of text. The whole bunch of things of that kind. So that's why repentance you are going to use a lot. Insert ribbon has something I use a lot. I have some and I need to know where it is, insert images I do fairly often and I need to know where that is. You can insert a slide number which I don't do but a lot of people do. And then you can insert multimedia. I believe in 2010 your choices to insert audio or video is two separate items. Here is an intermediary and they both show up under the same kind of thing. The design within the next one has several things mostly what we will look at next week is page setup and themes. You can pick your own foreground, background color and all bunch of things of that kind. And spend a long time trying to do that to make it pretty and do it so that the contrast is good Microsoft has put together a bunch of foreground and background things with font type and so on that are called fields and it's probably easier if you go pick one of those things you can really like and you can go on and do your own. The next slide is on animation and on 2010 my ribbon is split into two ribbons, animation and transitions. I will talk more about it next week but don't use it, animations often crash a screen reader and usually won't (inaudible)  on animation and it will not go and change it into a webpage, transitions some people like a lot. I don't like them. If you have them in transition so that it sets how long you want to stand this slide before you go to the next one if you have a user like me in the next screen doesn't work because it's waiting for your timing other people have one line coming in at a time and all kinds of fancy transition things you're going to use most of them on the way, they are no good on a handout and I think even the students without disabilities it's nice to let them know what they are seeing so they can study better. Slideshow is the next one. The thing I like. I've used once or twice is a slideshow start the slideshow where you are in stead of at the beginning so that when I'm creating a presentation and I'm halfway down the page and I want to see how it is I can start where I am instead of starting at the beginning and working my way down. But I don't use this much. The review ribbon is useful for proofing, mainly use the spellchecker you can get that from a click icon or I think it is shift seven or something will also doing. The review ribbon has several sets of commands like normal slide sorter. It will work like the thumbnail list the list you see a list of slides and you can shuffle them around in different orders and you will also find that extremely useful. So next is the selecting the slide layout and you will see there are several possible layouts. I'm also using title and content. Which gives me a place for a title and one place to put the content. I have to content to be useful there have been times I wanted to put a couple columns on a PowerPoint slide and it's not very easy to do even for someone who can see it's almost impossible for someone like me to do so if I take the items, to content areas I get to columns (inaudible)  I found that useful and the other ones I normally don't use. So (inaudible)  I find I need to use things in different places so the thumbnail I use you could use a slide sorter and the other thing I use is to copy slides from another presentation your often making any presentation somewhere and you realize there are three or four slides being used in another context and you can achieve it by cutting and pasting (inaudible)  you go to select insert ribbon, select new, select (inaudible)  edit from files and you browse and find the others presentation and you can highlight the slides you want and go through and they pop into your presentation at the point where you were in your presentation if you are at the bottom they get added at the bottom. If you are in the middle they get added in the middle but you can move them around they are not where you want them frankly if you are making life PowerPoint things you may find not very useful. So the only homework I'm giving you is to open up your PowerPoint like presentation maybe a title or subtitle put something or other for title and subtitle end up with the next slide which would give you title and content. Putting something or other, just make whatever you can for a play PowerPoint. Of course if you're already a PowerPoint user you may not need to do this. If you make several slides then you may want to play with the thumbnail view to cut and paste and move them around to play with it but basically the best thing you can do with PowerPoint is use it. So if you're not much of a user I suggest that you actually do get into it and try to make some slides move around just play with the basics. But don't worry about doing things fancy. We will get to that next week and the following two weeks. So we looked at what is PowerPoint good for, titling the content in advance, planning the display in advance where will it be delivered and two, selecting the options, exploring the views, exploring ribbons, selecting the layout. Next week what we are going to do is look at the accessibility issues. Start off by selecting theme and colors and font, inserting images, tables other things and learning how to add alt text into the images, how you avoid certain things and those are text boxes, animations, custom drawings, avoid, those are kind of I guess those are the main things we will go into more detail and more importantly I will try to tell you why to avoid them because I always like to know why, not just blindly and dumbly learn what to do and without understanding it. So according to my computer we've got 9 min. if you have PowerPoint open in front of you if there are things you want to talk about from the ribbons or whatever it will be glad to try to deal with that although he's probably got an idea looking at their ribbons that there are a lot of features and several of the features you see on your ribbon have combo boxes, pulled (inaudible) it has 100 or 200 things and I don't know them all. I mostly just use a few. So who has some questions?

   I am seeing your hand raised, do you have a question?

   sorry I had the key lock, Marisol.

   Okay thank you.

   Cindy wanted to know about notes. I didn't talk about notes. Say a word about notes, no about things we can and speaker notes or slides (inaudible)  using handouts and wanted to standalone the more notes you have the more information you can use for each slide to fill out its book. Basic problem I don't know (inaudible)  alone. Is that when you are giving a presentation you can see your notes. That's not quite true. I think of the slideshow there is one thing called presentation and it will tell you how to hook up your computer to two monitors and one monitor will show the slideshow and that will show on the project. Another monitor will show your notes. Sure. There is an advantage for blind people however there is a hotkey and it may be shift/I don't remember I will have to go look it up. It will allow JAWS to read the slide notes to me without showing them on the projector. For any of the us you need to have a lot of these. The nothing but if you're going to hamster out people if you include the notes with it they can really amplified the bullets on the handout.

   Cheryl commented that was a good overview is a reminder of some of the basics of the right way to prepare a PowerPoint presentation.

   I will confess again I don't always do it the right way. Do as I say, not as I do.

   I disagree, Norm. She says you are not alone there.

   Marisol, I think the last slide shows the link for the archives.

   Yes, norm, the link is HTTP:/legacy EAS I (inaudible)

  if you go there now you find a hot link that takes you to the slides as you watched them today. There are two dead links, one to today's recording and we hope that will be live by tonight by tonight or tomorrow (inaudible)  and another one includes our transcription when we get that from the captionist we put that up so that by tomorrow sometime the three links should be working.

   I don't see any questions, Norm.

   Okay well that was kind of basic, elementary. But I think sometimes we need to be reminded. I know that I often get doing things my own way and develop bad habits so it's good to be reminded and got back to the basics. So, working hard next week on accessibility. And many of those with the things related to screen readers but we will try to keep in mind the other does disability groups as well because they are also important. Probably the one that will be new interesting to you will be week for where we talk about animations and video.

   Thanks everyone for coming in and see you next week on the next part of this webinar. Thanks Norm. You did a great job. Thanks., For your captions.