Hello everyone my name is Marisol Miranda from EASI equal access to software and information and I want to welcome you all to this webinar on creating more attractive and accessible PowerPoint presentations. This week our presenter is Norman Coombs, CEO of EASI, very well known and I'm going to turn the mic over to Norm. Hi, Norm.

Hi Marisol and thank you everybody for coming and I want to make a couple general announcements. First I did send you an e-mail that you will find when you go to our resources page. Is a zip file if you download it it will include an image and audio and a video and the assignment I'm going to give you by the time we finished today is that you go and insert an image and should have an alt text tag on it, and insert an audio and the video and we will talk more about that as we go along. We have a free webinar coming up, ninth of February I think it is. The mainstream commercial the readers which have been very cool for people who are blind in particular are gradually becoming more accessible so we are having a webinar about the various mainstream be readers and their accessibility and inaccessibility. They seem to be moving more in that direction. I think this is encouraging so I urge you to attend that and get some of your friends to come to. And February we have a four part webinar series on cascading style sheets. Frankly I know little about it frankly I don't want to know much about it but I do need to know some basics and our presenter is going to be Karen McCall is one of our favorite presenters. Now before I turn to our presentation I want to lock your mic and a couple of different things so give me a second. Okay I got my bike a lot and I think that let's me have my hands free to do other things. So we are ready to begin. So, what we have covered last week was general PowerPoint introduction and today we're going to move on as you will see in the slide to talk about accessibility issues. Next week we're going to talk about taking your PowerPoint and in a couple of different forms one of PPT or PPT X file, another one changing it into word for a handout, PDF, putting it on the web and particularly talk a little bit about how to use a PowerPoint when you are in a lecture hall and take into account the needs of the audience who won't have a PowerPoint on the computer in front of them so you're going to have to do a lot of accessibility features yourself so that's where we are going to go next week. So what we are doing today, we are going to look at the problems that can be created for different disability groups and we're going to look at selecting themes and color and such things for your slides, inserting images, tables, charts audio, video and we're going to tell you some of the things you should avoid, text boxes, animations, transitions and we will explain why, what the problems are and that is basically it. So the first thing we want to talk about his accessibility for who? So the next slide list the kind of people that we need to be aware of they may have particular problems depending on how you design your PowerPoint. So first we are going to talk about visually impaired and blind and low vision people. The problems I'm going to talk specifically about their accessing the owner actual native PPT or PPS file. So the problems that people who are blind are going to have is, they're going to need to be using something that will take what's on the screen and speak it to them. Namely a screen reading software of some kind. And for the most part JAWS which is by far the most common and window eyes which is the second and even howl which is a third one will read PowerPoint slides. But these most features on PowerPoint slides we will talk about the future problems later on. I've been picking up on some things on the Internet lately that, there's a lot of schools with big budget cuts that are starting to provide students the an PDA. A nonvisual desktop accessibility, a free open-source open-source screen reader. It works pretty well for e-mail, standard e-mail programs, works pretty well in all word processors word, RTF text etc. Notepad, WordPad, all of those. Works pretty well for most features on the web. I didn't download the greatest version so my version which I almost never use may be out of date but it doesn't read PowerPoint PowerPoint at all. I'm sure there are other things that it's not going to read very well either so it depends where the school is providing that some of the things teachers may want to give their students it may not handle. I think in legal terms software that will give access to it the school will probably be required to provide JAWS or window eyes to such students not necessarily be the faculty persons responsibility from a legal point of view. However if you are the faculty person and you find out a student is using an PDA and cannot read your PowerPoint if you are really concerned about helping the student take your PowerPoint and export in some different format and give it to them and then we will be talking about in next week. For someone with low vision they will be using screen magnification and as far as I know all of those would work well with PowerPoint. Colorblind people we need to be aware of and we will talk about color later on. But the colors you use will be your responsibility one of the things that we don't mention here but that is one of the standards for software and web accessibility is that you don't convey information with color alone. So if you have on your slightest sound four or five different items in different colors and the colors are going to say you know, the red things are now and the green things are yes or things like that a person who is colorblind mic night make any sense out of that at all. So if you are conveying information because of its color then you may need to explain that in some other way for that reason. People with learning disabilities and cognitive disabilities may have problems reading your slides and we will talk a little bit more about that later, but essentially the simpler your language the more blank spaces are in each slide so that it's not quite as dense and confusing, the easier it will be for them. But for the most part that is a kind of---

Norm, we lost audio. Norm? Did we lose you?

Okay, I'm back. Let me lock my mic again. Okay, we are locked and I need to go back and look at where I was in my PowerPoint slides here, give me one second. Some of the problems you are going to face include prefixes if it's a simple image you can put alt text on it. If your graphic is dying of an electronic circuit the alt text on that the drawing of the electronic circuit on it isn't going to help much so if there's a lot of content being conveyed in the graphic that can be a problem you are either going to have to talk in detail about it or what I would often do is a previous slide I would explain what the graphic is going to be about not only for those with visual problem, but often times the graphic may take a lot of thought and explanation to understand it. So if you give all your audience some preview of what the graphic is going to be and what they should get out of it that would be good for everyone so I would tend to put a discussion of the graphic in the preceding slide and let them see the graphic. But this can be a problem. If it is more than just a picture. Charts. If the charge is something like a pie chart it is essentially a graphic and falls into the same discussion. Tables we're going to see an example of a table. And you understand when we get to it the ways in which it works and doesn't work. No I will just weekend explain. I'm not telling you not to use tables but I'm telling you the problems can be created especially for screen reader users. Hyperlinks. They probably work well for everyone except a screen reader user. As far as I know I know that JAWS won't and I doubt if window eyes does. If you put a hyperlink, slide and give me my JAWS screen reader will never find that it's there. I will try to click on it it will tell me there are no links on the slide. So that that can be a problem. So I tend to avoid it and if you are doing the audio or video instead of having a hyperlink to it if you embed it in the thing that will work better and we will explain that shortly, two. Poor color: stressed obviously you have to avoid font type and size we will talk about what is better or worse in that and again audio for the deaf if there is audio related to your slide one way or another you're going to have to get it to the transcript so those are the problem areas and we will talk a little bit about how you work with it. I want to come back again to say the main key for accessibility is to realize that what you are doing at least in education is you are communicating education so you need to be clear about your focus of what you want to say you may like make your language as plain and simple and clear as possible so better teaching for everyone is better teaching for people with disabilities. So don't just think of them as a special audience but the more you become a better teacher, the better communicator the better you are going to have help people with disabilities. And the next slide points out the technology is a means to the end and not the end in itself. Excuse a tired story have been told many times I was told I was a little kid before I lost my site used to be a horse and wagon, ran from the bakery, that shows you how long ago it was and on the back of it it said as you travel through this life whatever be your goal, keep your eye upon the donut and not on the whole. So keep your eye on the communication and for us boys and some of you girls to the technology is seductive and you want to show how cool you are in do fund, fancy things. And your students may say hey, my teacher is really a techie. He school and in the process they may not remember what you were telling them. So that, try to keep the technology transparent in the background and focus on the communication. So what are good slide characteristics? First you've got to have good color contrast and we will come to that in the next couple slides. You need clear, crisp font and most people, they all look the same to me and I'm blind, but people tell me that sans serif font is the clearest and most decisive and that would be particularly helpful with people with cognitive and learning disabilities and low vision as well. Good font size. Typically in PowerPoint when you are working at least what I find is when I put in a it goes and 44 points. When I put in stuff in the body text it usually is put in at 32 points. If I've got too much on the slide or sometimes I make the title 40, sometimes I make the text 28. I'm always a little nervous if I got as far as 24 because I don't see what it's like and I'm a little worried about it. If you are getting too much on your slide instead of making the font smaller and smaller, split it into two slides. So, good font size is important. You need spaces on the slide they tell me because I don't see it. If there are spaces and not just writing over the whole thing that your I can rest inis that it's easier for you to see and to sort out what is there. If it's all densely packed text it becomes hard for anyone to read it, understand it and grasping. In particular for people with learning and cognitive disabilities when too much information is grounded in too tightly it makes it a lot harder for them to decipher what is there. So I don't know if you call it white spaces because you probably have a color background on their but I didn't know how else to say it. So, the next slide shows you an example of poor contrast, I'm told. And you probably have seen things with poor contrast and not only color contrast but a lot of slides have a lot of patterning in the background and too much patterning in the background can make it hard to read the text written on top of it. So you need to think through those things. It's a judgment call and what you think is good one of your students may not think is good but try to make this judgment calls on things like that. So now we are coming down to, you are selecting things. Microsoft has put together what they call themes and it is essentially a slide layout with different foreground and background color, different font and they try to fix them with supposedly some experts picking things that go well together. Some of what the audience may want to are things that look cool or Jesse or different and me for that reason being primarily different may be eye-catching, but harder to read. So you need to look through their themes and try to think about something that is simple with good contrast that in your opinion at least is possible and what you do is pick one, try it on some slides, play around with it, try several until you are happy that you've got one or two things that you are happy with and you can use those. So that decide their themes, you can select colors individually. You may, instead of picking things just pick your own foreground and background colors and make your own theme, so to speak. I found times when I wanted to emphasize something on the slide and thought that one way to do it obviously is make the text bold or italics or something of that kind and put in alt text. Another way may be to change the color of some items so I play with a little bit and see what colors I haven't done too much but I can understand where there may be times where you may want to even take one sentence on the slide and instead of building then you may want to put some different color to make it jump out at people. So you can do that, but then you have to think about people who have trouble with colors and whether what you are doing helps you can pick whether these are all on the ribbons. So the next slide talks about selecting fonts and people have told me sometimes they like Ariel, some people like for Donna. I like usually try to pick whatever I'm told the sans serif font whether I'm doing it in a PowerPoint or a document but you can go to and try to pick different ones. It is tempting to pick something that is cute if you are teaching about the Middle Ages you might want to get some medieval looking Gothic font and that may in fact present your Gothic medieval field but it may meet it harder make it harder to read your slide. So full around with different fonts and see how they do you have probably Artie.net in different formats and you can do that here. And again as I said usually this font size that PowerPoint is going to give you without your thinking about it is 44 for the title, 32 for the body and you can play with us a little bit but I recommend again that instead of shrinking it down to small you go to two slides. So, you've got several layouts that you can use. And there's a list of them I don't play with most of them myself. I try to keep things fairly simple. But you can go there, look at the list and pick the ones that you want. Personally what I prefer as I mentioned on the next slide is a beginning slide that has title and subtitle and then the other sites have the title and the object placeholder where you can put in your body text into it. I have found that when I wanted or needed to columns on the slide for some reason maybe I had a long list of single words that was going way down to four it would look better on one side and two columns would do it not only have I found the column feature difficult to work with but I end up with one long column and one short one you may want to balance them out, editing and moving stuff around the columns I find it extremely difficult. I've talked to other people that have no disabilities with trouble with the two. My solution is to use a two content slide layout so that would give me a title and two separate places I can put in content and I can play with that and make a balance out the way that I want. So particular site choices simple clear and obvious again that is my preference. You may prefer something else and you could be better than what I choose. Okay. How are the images. And here is a picture of where you insert your image. You go to the insert ribbon and you go over to insert image and then you click on that and it's going to want you to find your image you can use the browse feature and move around find the image you want and click to insert your image. So it is fairly simple and straightforward. Sometimes I get lost on my own hard drive but other than that it's fairly simple (inaudible) some experience with doing already. And so we will go to the next slide where he talks about adding an alternative text to your image. And what you've got to do first is locate the image and put your cursor on it and right-click. And in 2007 and 2007 you have to click on size for some stupid reason and in 2003 and 2010 you click on format which makes a little more sense and from those menus you look for alt text in the text box where you can put in alternate text. You go over, type it in, press okay and the alt text should be there. I don't think there's any way without a screen reader that you are going to know for sure that it is there. But that is a process. It's not too difficult. Easy to forget and just charge ahead and not think about it but if there is any chance you're going to be giving our PowerPoint to someone with a disability you will want to put the alt text in and in some cases the alt text will be exported to other formats as well so it may be useful as well and those kinds of ways.

Norm?

Yes. Yes?

Sorry, Norm, the thing is that in 2007 and 10 there is no okay button. They just have to close the window and they will keep the alt text tag.

Okay, sorry, Marisol. Thank you very much. In any case, putting in an image isn't too hard. The only thing is with 2003 in 2010 format picture seems like a fairly different, decent choiceneed clear, crisp font and most people, they all look the same to me and I'm blind, but people tell me that sans serif font is the clearest and most decisive and that would be particularly helpful with people with cognitive and learning disabilities and low vision as well. Good font size. Typically in PowerPoint when you are working at least what I find is when I put in a it goes and 44 points. When I put in stuff in the body text it usually is put in at 32 points. If I've got too much on the slide or sometimes I make the title 40, sometimes I make the text 28. I'm always a little nervous if I got as far as 24 because I don't see what it's like and I'm a little worried about it. If you are getting too much on your slide instead of making the font smaller and smaller, split it into two slides. So, good font size is important. You need spaces on the slide they tell me because I don't see it. If there are spaces and not just writing over the whole thing that your I can rest inis that it's easier for you to see and to sort out what is there. If it's all densely packed text it becomes hard for anyone to read it, understand it and grasping. In particular for people with learning and cognitive disabilities when too much information is grounded in too tightly it makes it a lot harder for them to decipher what is there. So I don't know if you call it white spaces because you probably have a color background on their but I didn't know how else to say it. So, the next slide shows you an example of poor contrast, I'm told. And you probably have seen things with poor contrast and not only color contrast but a lot of slides have a lot of patterning in the background and too much patterning in the background can make it hard to read the text written on top of it. So you need to think through those things. It's a judgment call and what you think is good one of your students may not think is good but try to make this judgment calls on things like that. So now we are coming down to, you are selecting things. Microsoft has put together what they call themes and it is essentially a slide layout with different foreground and background color, different font and they try to fix them with supposedly some experts picking things that go well together. Some of what the audience may want to are things that look cool or Jesse or different and me for that reason being primarily different may be eye-catching, but harder to read. So you need to look through their themes and try to think about something that is simple with good contrast that in your opinion at least is possible and what you do is pick one, try it on some slides, play around with it, try several until you are happy that you've got one or two things that you are happy with and you can use those. So that decide their themes, you can select colors individually. You may, instead of picking things just pick your own foreground and background colors and make your own theme, so to speak. I found times when I wanted to emphasize something on the slide and thought that one way to do it obviously is make the text bold or italics or something of that kind and put in alt text. Another way may be to change the color of some items so I play with a little bit and see what colors I haven't done too much but I can understand where there may be times where you may want to even take one sentence on the slide and instead of building then you may want to put some different color to make it jump out at people. So you can do that, but then you have to think about people who have trouble with colors and whether what you are doing helps you can pick whether these are all on the ribbons. So the next slide talks about selecting fonts and people have told me sometimes they like Ariel, some people like for Donna. I like usually try to pick whatever I'm told the sans serif font whether I'm doing it in a PowerPoint or a document but you can go to and try to pick different ones. It is tempting to pick something that is cute if you are teaching about the Middle Ages you might want to get some medieval looking Gothic font and that may in fact present your Gothic medieval field but it may meet it harder make it harder to read your slide. So full around with different fonts and see how they do you have probably Artie.net in different formats and you can do that here. And again as I said usually this font size that PowerPoint is going to give you without your thinking about it is 44 for the title, 32 for the body and you can play with us a little bit but I recommend again that instead of shrinking it down to small you go to two slides. So, you've got several layouts that you can use. And there's a list of them I don't play with most of them myself. I try to keep things fairly simple. But you can go there, look at the list and pick the ones that you want. Personally what I prefer as I mentioned on the next slide is a beginning slide that has title and subtitle and then the other sites have the title and the object placeholder where you can put in your body text into it. I have found that when I wanted or needed to columns on the slide for some reason maybe I had a long list of single words that was going way down to four it would look better on one side and two columns would do it not only have I found the column feature difficult to work with but I end up with one long column and one short one you may want to balance them out, editing and moving stuff around the columns I find it extremely difficult. I've talked to other people that have no disabilities with trouble with the two. My solution is to use a two content slide layout so that would give me a title and two separate places I can put in content and I can play with that and make a balance out the way that I want. So particular site choices simple clear and obvious again that is my preference. You may prefer something else and you could be better than what I choose. Okay. How are the images. And here is a picture of where you insert your image. You go to the insert ribbon and you go over to insert image and then you click on that and it's going to want you to find your image you can use the browse feature and move around find the image you want and click to insert your image. So it is fairly simple and straightforward. Sometimes I get lost on my own hard drive but other than that it's fairly simple some experience with doing already. And so we will go to the next slide where he talks about adding an alternative text to your image. And what you've got to do first is locate the image and put your cursor on it and right-click. And in 2007 and 2007 you have to click on size for some stupid reason and in 2003 and 2010 you click on format which makes a little more sense and from those menus you look for alt text in the text box where you can put in alternate text. You go over, type it in, press okay and the alt text should be there. I don't think there's any way without a screen reader that you are going to know for sure that it is there. But that is a process. It's not too difficult. Easy to forget and just charge ahead and not think about it but if there is any chance you're going to be giving our PowerPoint to someone with a disability you will want to put the alt text in and in some cases the alt text will be exported to other formats as well so it may be useful as well and those kinds of ways. Norm? Yes. Yes? Sorry norm, the thing is that in 2007 and 10 there is no okay button. They just have to close the window and they will keep the alt text tag. Okay, sorry, Marisol. Thank you very much. In any case, putting in an image isn't too hard. The only thing is with 2003 in 2010 format picture seems like a fairly different, decent choice to start looking for the text of you. Size, which is the choice you've got to do 2007 doesn't seem like a decent choice at all. So for a lot of us that was awfully confusing, looks like the text field had gone away, but it really hadn't. Okay, hello? Oh, okay. Thank you. I've got a second computer and my second computer stopped working so I thought my voice had stopped. You can't trust anything anymore. So if you don't hear me, let me know because my second computer is not telling me. So, inserting audio and video again, off of the insert menu in either seven or 10 you can go and find the places where you can insert audio and video and it is the same process really as inserting an image. So you select, so you select what you want to do and then usually they give you choices importing it from the library I always have it somewhere as a file so I insert from file and again you have to browse and find your file and inserted and that is fairly simple. Now, typically what happens is it will have an item on the slide for media, and you would click on media I use that a lot although I usually go to the (inaudible) view into it from there but it's the same kind of thing. This compact not the one on JAWS, but the first one on tables so if you go to insert a table, go to insert, select tables and then it will have you select how many columns and rows you want. And it will set the table up for you and then you can going to the table and fill it out. The question we need to look at is how does the screen reader read a table to make sense out of it and before you play it let me comment what you are going to, what you do is go and take your eyes and look at a particular cell and from there you take a glance to the column header in the row header to make sense out of that cell. If this were an Excel spreadsheet I could set it up so that when I had a read the contents of the cell it would automatically read the relevant headers. Which would help me make sense out of that. In PowerPoint it doesn't let me do that. What you are going to hear, we are going to listen to JAWS read it, a well read across the column a row, and it will say row one, column 1, speak one row one column to speak the contents and if it is a simple table I could probably make sense of it so here let's listen to JAWS. Okay, do you hear me now? Hello, do you hear me? Do you hear me? Okay, good. Good, good, thank you. I do have two computers to years, but the one stopped talking. So if you keep this very simple you can keep in mind what you are may be reading row three column for you can't remember that that was lunch and it is not too hard to do, but if it is a complex table that is more than that it's going to be hard for me to keep in mind all of those things. I can go back with the arrow keys and read it but I've still got to go through it step-by-step, one cell at a time and it is hard to scramble and understand. If the table is what you really need to do I guess you go ahead and do it. If there is some other way to present the information just as clearly for everyone, then maybe sometimes you skip the table, table is a good way to present a complex array of information so I don't want to tell you not to use it but beware the limitations. I want to jump to the slide where you start getting the slide for another presentation. This is one that I use frequently when I was preparing this presentation it will put them in your presentation at the point where you were top, mid Usually I had several other previous presentations that were similar to this in some ways. And instead of inventing everything from scratch I went and pulled some slides from here and some from there, so how can you do that? So this is what you do is you go to your home a ribbon, you select a new slide and you find reuse slide you click on that and you will get different choices, one is to get slides from another file. Click on that and you can get a browse menu and find your other slide and open it.what I found I do is if I found one slide I (inaudible) I find that sometimes a very useful kind of thing sometimes I get lost in the process of doing it and frankly I found another way that I'm starting to use more often I will open a second slide show, go down and find the slide that I want, go over to tie don't and copy the title, open a new slide in my new presentation and copy that title into the title field and do the same thing with the body so if it is just one slide I'm wanting I often just go and do it that way. But at least I find it useful to get stuff from the previous presentation and bring them into what I'm doing. Okay we will proceed from there. So, avoid animations and transitions. First of all either of them will export it to the web and if you are turning it into his hand out it's not going to export to a handout. So they have limited usefulness as it is and animations will usually not work with a screen reader at all. Sometimes make it crash, some people like transitions where you may have a slight instead of the whole slide coming up and it would be a line at a time and I don't like it but some people do and there may be places to do it. The problem if you are handing the PPT with transition and it to someone who is blind I've had one been looking at the slide I'm happy with it I hit the for the next slide and only part of the slide comes up and I don't know what's going on. I hit the and another part comes up or I don't understand that it's a transition that's going on and I'm used to it going from slide to slide to slide and I tend to get frustrated. The other problem with transitions is that they usually are time so that something comes in in some particular so that your slides are time I go and say I want the next slide it won't, until the time is up. As a learner I like to have control over what I'm learning and I think the more of what you learn and have control of the more you can learn better so I would say avoid them both. Avoid text boxes. For most of you a text box may look very much like you are putting stuff into the body of the text and I've seen some people use them it used to be that JAWS would read text boxes. It does count but text boxes often get lost when you make it into a webpage and often get lost when you save it to some other format so that both for blind users and for other users it is a tricky thing and simplest just to avoid it. Drawing features are pictures, so if you use customized drawings of something or other again you're going to have to put alt text on it or something of that kind so it is better just to stick with the standardized features of PowerPoint rather than customizing. And the next slide says to avoid hyperlinks and I explained the problem with that although it may be times when it is okay to use them and the next slide suggests that there are times and places not to make it accessible PowerPoint. I'm not telling you you have to do it all the time there are times when you're going to give something to an audience when you know has nobody who is blind using a screen reader and it and there's no reason you should be bound by that if you are giving a presentation in a lecture hall you may want presentations and animations. All of those things, so in terms of using your PowerPoint in a particular place I'm not going to try to tie you down (inaudible) tell you there's only one way to do it but just be sure that what you are doing is appropriate. The next slide I suggest you start with a simple generic slide presentation. Especially if it is a topic you're going to present on frequently. It is harder to go through slides and remove transitions, animations and things of that kind then it is to add them, so what I try to do is keep a fairly generic basic universal presentation and then when I need to adapt it for a specific audience I go ahead and do it. So I told you you had an assignment in the next slide it tells you what it is. I suggest you play around with PowerPoint, play around with different themes and colors and font types but also in the image, nice zip file on my resources page with an image file and audio and a video and a read mail file if you have your own audio and video and images, find, ignore the ones I gave you I'm just trying to make things easier for you so play around with adding an image, adding an alt text to it, adding audio or video and get used to that kind of thing. It's easier to learn thing, learn something if you actually use it. So what we have learned this week are the kind of problems PowerPoint creates for different disability groups selecting themes and colors etc. inserting images, charts, tables etc., things to avoid and that is basically what we have covered. So, next week we are going to talk about taking your PowerPoint and saving it in different delivery modes. Webpages, word document for handouts, PDF document, RTF document a bunch of different things you can do with it. So we will look at several of those, places where they may be especially useful for people with disabilities or maybe especially useful for you as a teacher. And we will be here same the same time same station next week and