Hello everyone I'm Marisol Miranda from EASI equal access to software and information and I want to welcome you all to this presentation on creating more attractive and accessible PowerPoint presentations. This week we are, today's presenter is going to be Norm Coombs, CEO of EASI. Hi, Norm, the mic is yours.

   Okay I've locked the mic and I need to get over into my PowerPoint presentation, give me one second. Okay. So just to remind you of what we have done the last two weeks, first week we just try to familiarize you with PowerPoint for those who were not very familiar with it. I started back on it was you know, before they had ribbons and now we've had a couple different versions of the operating systems with ribbons in it. And we will be referring you to both 2007 and 2010. So then aside from looking at the basics of PowerPoint we started to talk about accessibility, so talked a bit about cognitive, color contrast, those kinds of things, adding alt text to images and how to use tables and things of that kind. This week we're going to talk about how you deliver PowerPoint. We can deliver it in different venues are different situations and partly you need to know about the different ways you can do it also most of you may know that and we will talk a little bit about the accessibility good and bad points about each of these different ways of exporting PowerPoint into something else. First we're going to talk about the basic PowerPoint PPT or PPT X file which you may share with people and because of saving two different modes for different venues and using it with different audiences I recommended last week that you make a generic basic file and save that and then you can add features to it later. It is easier to add features to the presentation that has a presentation with a lot of jazzy features and then try to get rid of them because you know they won't work in some other situation. So we will talk about delivering the classroom are lecture presentation, creating handouts in PDF, RTF and word and delivery on the (inaudible)  course management system, learning management system and last thing we will look at is using a wizard that will help you make accessible webpages that's a quick preview of what we will be doing so we will start universal design as I said a moment ago follow learned last week about accessibility issues so, worry about color contrast and alt text for your images so I have the basic presentation that's fairly simple and straightforward. And if you are going to deliver it somewhere where you may want to other features added you can add them to your (inaudible)  if it's a topic you're going to talk about it more than one place, and more than one situation I think it is good to have a basic universal design presentation that you can fall back on and modify it for different situations. I do that, and the other thing I do is sometimes when I'm making a new presentation I want to steal a few slides from the previous one and if it is a basic generic one it is easier to integrate them together. So if you are going to deliver the basic PPT PPT X which I refer to as a native format I'm not sure what is the best language or verbiage to explain this, but when I talk about native I'm talking about the basic output that you get when you save a PowerPoint presentation. To its native format. So again be sure that if you are going to share that with people, be sure you make the slide contrast good, (inaudible) good, all the things we talked about last week and especially if there is some chance that someone in your audience is going to read it may be using screen readers and if you have images and alt text tag you need to avoid animations and transitions for the most part. One of the reasons I discourage using transitions even if you are not dealing with a disability audience is that as a teacher and a student I think it is good for the student to control what he is looking at. If you give me a PowerPoint and you've got transitions and timing set into it so that it's going to change from slide one to slide into in 10 seconds you're going to give me 10 seconds to study it I may need more time than that and you will let me do it or soon as I look at the slide I say that is what I want to move to the next one and you won't let me know if I like to let the student have a control they can also backup and look at the previous slide. So I think timing and transitions in an educational setting are problematic and we will talk a little later if you have a slide show that you want to let's say you are at an exhibition hall at some conference and you want to have your slide show go over and over and over on a computer, on your table. Then you do want timing, so you need to guess how long you want each slide to appear for people walking by to look at because you don't want to be there, you don't want them handling the computer, so there are situations where transitions are good in fact even necessary but I think for the most part other than most I discourage it. The other thing that you need to think about is the people you are giving your PPT two or your PPT X, do they have PowerPoint? This struck me as a surprise a few years ago. I moved into computers in DOS and I got word, you had to buy the word processor at that point and I had word and when office came out I got that and eventually I just took it for granted that everybody had word and PowerPoint and Excel and find out that they may just be using notepad or maybe even Microsoft Works or something but they may not have access to this piece of software that will show PowerPoint for them. So you need to think about who your audience is and if you have a class and you're going to be giving a PPT files you need to tell them that they should get PowerPoint or maybe the PowerPoint viewer. You can't always take it for granted that your audience will be able to look at it. So the other situation is when you are in a lecture Hall are a classroom. Typically you will probably be using a classroom where you are, you already know what the lighting is like it too much like coming in the window so they won't see the slides if you put them up on the screen, all those kinds of things you will know whether it is a giant room and people maybe sitting behind a pole obstructing. Vision or somebody has a fathead, if it's a small room you don't need to worry about those kinds of things, when you are going to a conference you may need to think about those things and typically you may not know what they are, so you may need to think about what if when I get in there it's a giant room with lots of people and some of them will be sitting way back and won't be able to see the screen half as well as I wish they would in which case you may need to think about our your pictures, your slides really easy to read for somebody who's having a problem leaving out the disability problems. As I mentioned at the body me need to be ready for a snafu when something goes wrong. I recall years ago back in the days of the overhead projector I was showing some slides connected to the Internet to show a presentation and suddenly people said well, the colors, because there's a projector were bleeding out so much, they could read what the projector was showing. I was nicely connected to the Internet he was pulling up what I wanted for them to see, but they couldn't see it because the projector or something was so bright or whatever that that color was bled out and they couldn't make it out. Try to make a habit of being prepared for a catastrophe so what I did was I reached under the table, pulled out some overhead slides I had, transparencies, dropped it on the projector and I don't think most people even knew that I switched off the Internet and was showing pictures that I taken before I'd come. One of the things I hate when I'm at a presentation is if the person starts running into trouble and I've been there where they can't connect to the Internet and we spend five or 10 min. well they are fussing with technologies and they may eventually work it out but it frustrates me as an audience member. So I try to come prepared for that. The worst thing that ever happened to me, I think that was even there, if I recall was in Rochester, my hometown went down to the conference center and walked into the room and went up on stage and the only thing on stage was a live mic lying on the floor of the stage, no podium, no nothing. No projector. No screen I think they had a screen there, but still no projector, people had found a table from out in the hall and brought it in so I could put my computer on it and they were off running around to get a projector and they said it's coming, it's coming and it was time for the presentation to start, so I said to the audience pretend you are blind and I'm going to tell you what you are looking at on the screen. And I went ahead and halfway through they got me all hooked up but I know how much I hate waiting while people play technology games and all that kind of stuff, so be ready for a snafu. Think of what you would do “if”. So that is part of what I think of, I remember the classroom, they brought in a projector and they didn't have the table to connect this to that and all the other things and it was really frustrating to me in the class. So, prepare for a snafu. Contrast which I already mentioned, I don't think I need to do that but what are you going to do if you get into your presentation and you find there are some people there who are blind. Now, if you had an image on your slide, a picture of something and if you put an alt text tag on it what does that do for somebody sitting in the audience who is blind and doesn't have his computer with them, doesn't have slides on his computer, so your alt text tag on your image doesn't do anything. So you have to fill the role of a screen reader as a blind person in the audience, I find that 95% of the presentations I go to I don't feel that I miss much because most presenters are talking about what is on the screen. They may not stand and read it and I don't necessarily need to have them reading, it's kind of boring and insulting to people but

 if they are talking about what's there and explaining it I usually get the feeling that I haven't missed much. Now I remember one I was at, I'm not sure what he could've done that was different, but he had some bar charts up there and he said no if you look at this line that is blue and that is such and such and another one is there, and that means something else and I got zilch. I don't think he could've done much about it. Let me get the phone out of the way so we won't hear it and trust that my wife answers that. So there are situations like that if you have deaf people in the audience it's good if you let them know ahead of time that they should net you know ahead of time so they can arrange to have some sign interpreter. But issues like that you need to think about when you are giving a presentation to a live audience. So you can export from PowerPoint all kinds of different formats. We will first look at exporting to PDF is a little different in 2007 and 2010. I will show you a screenshot in a moment. When you output it it's as if it were one slide per page if you were to print the PDF. And I'm not quite sure what use that would be to anybody anywhere what I would want to do is shrink it down a great deal. But unless you've got Adobe Acrobat the Adobe reader will let you do anything to change it. So it has its limitations. If you do have Acrobat then you can change it and do all kinds of things and end up with probably a fairly good PDF file. So the next slide is a shot of exporting to PDF I will give you a second to look at it. It should let you see what it's like for 2007, 2010. It's similar, but a little bit different. If you really need or want a PDF output I do think you want to have Acrobat to edit and change the PDF so it's much more usable. So next we will look at exporting from PowerPoint to the RTF. RTF is one of the more ubiquitous, universal file formats. Can be read in almost any word processor, on almost any brand of computer. So it can be a good thing and, so you go to saving it, look for file type, go down to RTF and to save it, and what you will get is an RTF file. It has only the text that was on your PowerPoint. And images or anything else is gone. If you had an image and the alt text tag, that's going to. So depending on your PowerPoint that may be useful and it may not be useful. If I were giving to a blind student I would make a point of going into the RTF file and putting a blank line line because sometimes when it keeps running on you don't know you're on another site and things can be kind of confusing. That's one way to get something out that can be useful for certain situations with certain students. So now we look at exporting PowerPoint to a Word document and it's a little different between 2007 and 2010 we will look at the slide shot in a minute. When you've selected, it will let you choose several different layouts. One will be a picture on your slide with blank lines, not there will be a picture of your slide with a place for your speaker notes if you had them. We will let you choose different ways of having a blank lines beside the slide or under the slide I think this can be very useful if you are giving a line the presentation someplace and you want the students in the audience to really study and follow along with you you can give them handouts that will show the picture, the slide and they can have them and listen to you and have a place where they can scribble notes because it is hard to scribble notes on the speaker. This will have a picture to remind them of what you are showing them and a place to scribble notes on it. Let me go to the next slide. Usually PowerPoint are just bullets and if you are giving it to someone who wasn't at your presentation it has fairly limited value. If on the other hand you had extensive speaker notes that if you save it with the speaker notes and give it to someone at the presentation it may be very useful. It's also useful for people who are deaf if your speaker notes are your basically summarizing what you are saying, so even if they were there life having the text of what you were saying there can be useful. One of the choices is also to save it to RTF and that can be the same as RTF gives you the text only and nothing else. Probably to remind you the best use for this is to give it to an audience that wants to follow along and really study what you are saying and take notes on what you are saying and so that's a good way for them to put their own comments to think for them to remember. The next slide gives you a couple screenshots. And I will give you a minute or two to look at it. It's a little different and 2007 2010 sometimes the changes they make seem to me to make very little difference to the function of things but then they move them around I guess to make you feel you've got to buy a new product. Sometimes I don't feel that what they've done changes anything basic or really serves any purpose. But it makes you think you've got to buy a new one. Well, I'm cynical. One of the things I complain about with the continual changing software and making you want to buy an upgrade is that I claim that I'm upgrade fatigue syndrome. Wish to change a lot less frequently. So here's the next slide is 2010. The first one is 2007. This is I can save to a Word document in 2010. I think if you give a lot of presentations like at conferences this can be really very useful thing to have, give them something where they can follow along and so if you are not familiar with it it is worth playing with it. You end up with a Word document which is pretty easy to do anymore (inaudible)  take to a conference and give as handouts. Okay. Now we will look at exporting to web or HTML files. It is a little different in the two different versions and you will need to play with that and see how it saves. The next slide, talk about the accessibility of the Web output that you get. From the point of view of a screen reader in particular what's there a screen reader can't read but it's very confusing to navigate and make your way around and make sense out of it. So that technically it is there, technically it is accessible but most of us would find it very difficult to use. So it can be done there may be places that you want to use it so what do I recommend? In our presentations, this is a PowerPoint presentation that I saved using one of my favorite tools called (inaudible)  like share Wizard and I really want to introduce you to it and have you play with it and if you love it as much as I do then you may find it very helpful. I moved ahead of myself. Screenshot, and saving to the web. So if you save it with the links share Wizard what it does is works with PowerPoint, any version of PowerPoint and it will let you save webpages that are fully accessible and more than that, the wizard will look at your presentation and look for accessibility problems, tell you about the and let you fix the problem without having to know or understand much of anything. So I just walks you through basically what a wizard should do. I'm going to urge you to get a copy of Lex share and get an assignment the end of the today for you to do which we know next week, but the webpage that is pretty simple, you don't need W or anything you just go to Lex share.com LEC SHO a re:.com so what does LEC share actually do? The next slide shows what it does. It converts Microsoft PowerPoint to accessible HTML, QuickTime movies, video podcasts, Microsoft Word handouts, so there are two versions of LEC share, LEC share leg which will let you take a PowerPoint template on accessible webpages and handouts. LEC share Pro will let you add audio to the output and make it into a video as well. And we will go into next week and show you examples of what it does. If we go to the like share page you can't get LEC share leg which is free or you can get LEC share Pro and the trial is free the Provo you do the audio and video the light will just make the webpages. For what I want you to do next week (inaudible)  for the assignment I'm going to give you shortly. So how do you start Lex share. Lecture is assuming that you've already created a PowerPoint so you select LEC share which you install and it will show up on your desktop probably, you, so it gives you the option to open and you search on your hard drive to find the presentation that you are wanting, and you click on it to open it. And it imports you a PowerPoint, studies the PowerPoint to see the accessibility things that it's going to walk you through that. So the next slide shows you a snapshot of what LEC share is like when you open it. Just a fairly simple standard program. So, you use it to search for the thing you want to import and you click on open and it imports it and the next slide shows you a snapshot of what is called the lecture trade. So there is a trade showing a list of the slides numbered and the title of the slide and defending them I have an accessibility problem ticket to load in the software because it is not only loading it, it is examining it for accessibility problems. So that's pretty straightforward. The tray will let you click and see if you have problems and whether you care to fix them are not. The next slide identifies the problems and gives you buttons for where the problems are. And they can be things like adding alt text text to an image, things about tables. It will want you to put a title in four as slide and I always wondered why that was considered an accessibility problem and maybe it isn't but part of what LEC share will do will make a table of content for your slides and make a table of contents from the title. So if there is no title it can't, anyhow. Next slide. So here is a screenshot of preparing item where the title is missing. On your slide it may not be slide number five. It's got the missing title, but here it is, so you click on it and it opens up a text box where you can type in the title, click okay and it's done. The next slide shows missing alt text tag on an image and gives you a button to click on to fill it in. And again you just type in and and when you are finished say okay and move on. The following slide there's a number of you have adding alt text to an image. So I can't be made much simpler than that. We talked about adding alt text to a PowerPoint, and if you do that they will be here in your lecture and you will need to do it on for faculty that don't know anything about alt text tax or how to do it in PowerPoint it doesn't matter. It's going to find that it's missing and just tell them to fill in the box and pain, it's there. So that you don't need to know a lot of things about accessibility. It will find them, it will show you how to fix them and fix them for you. So, when you've done that and you have the Virgin that you've produce the way you wanted and LEC share has told you it's taken care of the accessibility issues you want to kick out your webpages, so you go to export and as I will show you in a picture in a minute it gives you a whole bunch of boxes you can fill in. Most of the first boxes are what we would call meta-data, so you can put in your name completed the copyright date and year, you can put in things about the key words and all those kinds of things that you put into meta-data. Most of the time for what I'm doing I don't feel it in at all because for my purposes I don't give a time. The advantage of meta-data is you put it up in the web web and you go to public to find it, search engines look for metadata is one of the things they are looking for so if you have a keyword in their that is what someone was searching for in Google they would find your presentation if you don't, they might not. So it can be very useful. Then as you are looking down the list of things when you are going to export one for web HTML that is what you want to save it to, so you would click on that and highlighted. It would pop up the options button and you click on that and it would give you some other options. One of them is whether you want to add a table of contents or not. For my purposes I usually don't. Some places they may be useful and then you're going to click on okay and you still got the export options there and you find export their again and so you click on export this time. And what it does, it says hey where do you want to save it. And it will open up your computer and usually what I find the first thing says my computer and I click on that and I click in the C Dr. for D Dr. and I eventually find the folder I want to save it in. LEC share suggests you should save it in NMT folder. I usually don't. It will say this stuff in this folder you still want to save it and in which case I say yes it takes a minute or two while it saves that and tells you you are done and then you click on okay (inaudible)  and you are out. I don't know if Marisol has gotten to the slide showing the picture of the export options. But that basically shows a picture of what I've just discussed. I will give you a second to look at it again. You can put any metadata you want to, then you click on you want to save as web HTML and later we will show that you may want to save your speaker notes, you may want to save it as a QuickTime movie for just saving the webpages you don't want to do those things, we will talk about that next week and so when you've got all your choices done you click on export again and it saves it and then you will find it in the folder where you told it to say that you go in there and you're going to find a bunch of stuff. The one that you need to talk about his the file.index.htm and if you click on index.htm you're going to see a webpage of the first slide it will have next and previous, won't have a previous button, the next button click on that and it brings up the next slide and on that point you have a next and previous you can go forward and backward and walk you through the presentation. So we've got an assignment. I hope you will try to take some PowerPoint and try saving it in PDF, RTF word versions, play with that, see how they work and see ways that you think they would be most useful in our situations. And then as part of the assignment I'm going to want you to go to LEC share, LEC share light will do for this presentation if you get LEC share produce only 20 bucks or you can get the trial version and what the trial version does it will let you do everything, but on every slide with output signal stick a watermark across the page so that you really want to go use it somewhere. But it will let you see and test the functionality of the software so, whether you to do the assignment this week with LEC share light or probably and have the watermarks, it doesn't really matter to me. When you go to our resources page. So, what you type that in the window for me http://...good job. And I will be sending you mail lesson is this presentation is finished that will help you go to that page. You will find that on their assignment for week three. It is a zip file. If you click on in your browser will say what you want to do with this, opening or save it. You say save it, and be sure to see where it is saved and you go to the zip file and click on it, go to extract all and it will unzip it and put it in a folder for you and there will be two things there, one is a readme file, which repeats the LEC share assignment that you do and the other one is a short PowerPoint in case you don't have one. You don't have to use the one I put up there for you but you can use the PowerPoint to save RTF word and all the others but you can also use it in LEC share it has to accessibility problems and it so you can find those in LEC share in be able to repair them. So that is the assignment. Let me just quickly review what we've covered. On the next slide. So we looked at different saving options. Talked about the importance of the native version, how to think about using PowerPoint in a lecture Hall or classroom and talked a bit about the accessibility issues you may or may not confront. Talked about how to save it in different formats, PDF, RTF, Word. And I've given you a brief introduction to saving the PowerPoint as webpages using LEC share. So let me take off the lock speaker okay, the lock is going, so any of you can either use your mic or type into the text window if you have any questions. Part of what I had hoped would come across is that if you have a student with a disability who doesn't have PowerPoint or something else you may need to try to find some way to give your PowerPoint in a different version you introduce different versions and think about what might work best for that particular student in their particular disability.

   Valerie says being blind I have trouble staying with my slides when I'm presenting using PPT. Do you have suggestions how to work with the slides in a presentation?

   Do you push your slides or does someone else push them?

   I pushed myself.

   Okay, you can, at least I can use my up and down arrows to read what it is showing on the projector sometimes, we've got the clicking back, but I'm glad it wasn't there before. Sometimes reading what is on the screen and trying to talk and push slides has you thinking about two or three different things that can be a problem. Sometimes I have just gone through and pushed a slide at a time notecards with the information in the slide so that I'm not trying to listen to JAWS and read it, it's easier to read braille and talk at the same time than it is to listen to JAWS and talk at the same time. I've also occasionally save the whole thing as a TXT file and put it into something like book sense, or Victor stream or one of those things and listen to that in my ear. Although I find it hard to listen to that as I would listen to JAWS and talking at the same time. So it is easier to you read braille and talk at the same time then to listen to something else. The other thing that I have found that you might be interested in his, you can save speaker notes. On your slides and a blind person can e-mail me and I will tell you the keystroke and that will a you read your speaker notes but nobody else is going to see them. I still of the problem of trying to listen to something and talk at the same time, so that is a problem and what I've been doing here to be honest with you I've had Marisol pushing the slides and I have PowerPoint open here outside of the conference or and pushing my slides and my PowerPoint and using up and down arrow and JAWS to read what is there. Hopefully by having reviewed it four or five times before I get them here I usually remember what is there without having to read it. So I will get to Maria and a second. The other thing is the problem is the more you do it, the more you relax. That is if I'm uptight it is hard to do three things at once. If I'm relaxed I can do it easier, so try to build confidence, so yes, the question was if I put it HTML link, the link anyhow, a hyperlink in the slide, Johnson ever finds it. If I put a link and saved as a webpage in LEC share it is there and JAWS will find it. And I think that Mike clicking wasn't there when I was presenting even though it is coming back now. I want to show you, I get nothing from LEC share by pushing the product. I just find it most useful, there's another tool out there called virtual 508. It grew out of a product that the University of Illinois put out and a lot of us used for years. They gave it or sold it to another company, virtual 508, which has changed it some and is selling it. I don't like the format personally and it's a little bit more expensive than I'd like. So I use LEC share. I live and die by it so that's why I share it even though I don't get any money out of it. Thanks, Marisol. One of the things I don't think we will talk about here is, you can take a PowerPoint presentation and use fantasia, a multimedia authoring tool and run PowerPoint after that, and turn it into a movie and you can even put in streaming captions with it in fantasia. That's an excellent product. It's an excellent output, but a little bit more complicated. Well, let me make an official lending. Although I will stay here until the hour comes around. So, Marisol can wind up the recording. Thank you all for coming and if you have any problem with the assignments you can e-mail me in the meantime and we will see you next week either in person next week, or in the recording.