I’m busy building presentations for some upcoming conferences, so here are some tips I also posted on Twitter about making your presentations more accessible. All but one of these tips are applicable regardless of the software that you use to build presentation content.
Some reminders about accessible design and making sure your audience can read and understand the visuals you are presenting.
- Don’t use anything less than 24pt font for body text. 32pt would be better. https://uxpamagazine.org/make-your-presentations-accessible/
- Make sure color contrast of your text vs the background is at least 4.5. If you have text on top of an image, you need to be careful with this as some of the colors in the image may not have good contrast. https://medium.muz.li/the-science-of-color-contrast-an-expert-designers-guide-33e84c41d156
- There are handy tools like https://developer.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrastanalyser/… that help you measure color contrast. There are also websites like https://accessible-colors.com where you can plug in your color values.
- Minimize the amount of text on your slide. Avoid having giant paragraphs of text or a dozen bullet points on your slide. https://washington.edu/doit/how-can-you-make-your-presentation-accessible
- Avoid using color as the only means of conveying visual information https://adod.idrc.ocadu.ca/powerpoint2010#_Toc284500796
- Avoid bad color combinations that don’t work for people with color vision deficiency (but if you mess up here, that’s what the extra visual property for conveying information above is for). https://usabilla.com/blog/how-to-design-for-color-blindness/
- Don’t go crazy with the animations and transitions. Simple appear/disappear may be fine, but often we don’t need any transitions. Use animations to help focus attention on a part of your visual presentation, not just to entertain. https://webaim.org/techniques/powerpoint/
- If you are leaving behind your presentation file, make sure you have added alt text to all non-text content or marked decorative items as such. And make sure the reading order is properly set for screen readers and keyboard users. http://blog.247accessibledocuments.com/2017/02/15/checking-the-reading-order-of-a-powerpoint-slide/
- PowerPoint has a built-in Accessibility Checker that is there to help you: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/improve-accessibility-with-the-accessibility-checker-a16f6de0-2f39-4a2b-8bd8-5ad801426c7f
Why lose the engagement of a single person in your audience because of poor design choices? Most of the design tips I list are not that difficult to implement, and many of them can be built in to your presentation template, which I hope you are customizing to fit your content (and yes, I’m aware of the struggle of using templates provided by conference organizers). See below for my thoughts on the built-in templates in presentation design software.
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