This guide advises on best practice for accessible PowerPoints. It makes suggestions you can implement when designing slides, sharing files, or during live presentations. The information is gathered from several agencies that promote good accessibility and good practice drawn from across the sector.
Cognitive Load
Cognitive load theory is essential for you to understand, as it provides critical insights into how students mentally process new information. By comprehending the limitations of working memory and designing slides focused on minimising extraneous details, academics can greatly improve learning outcomes. Thoughtfully integrating techniques like the signalling principle and dual coding can unlock students’ cognitive load, enabling more effective processing of the new concepts you are teaching them. An awareness of these key principles allows you to create presentations that are more impactful, efficient, and engaging for your pupils. Useful introductory to cognitive load theory
Using Colour
- Use single-colour backgrounds. Avoid background patterns or pictures and distracting surroundings.
- Use of ‘off-white off-black contrast’ for background and text. Multiple individual factors including lighting in the environment/situational and the nature of the visual/cognitive impairment mean that it is impossible to arrive at one colour combination that all prefer. Off-white and off-black contrasts are best practices. Changing contrast using the master slide can be useful if the ambient light in the room makes it harder to read. Having a dark background colour with off-white text is just as useful as a white background with off-black text.
- Avoid using colour as the only indicator: If you want to draw attention to something use more than colour to highlight it e.g. the colours in a graph. To make information more accessible, differentiate it in more than one way. For example:
- use both colour and text to mark up different chart elements.
- use patterns on graphs to distinguish between different elements.
- Avoid red and green contrast red/pink, as these colours are difficult for those who have colour vision deficiencies (colour blindness).
- Avoid using a traffic light system to categorise content or use red to highlight important information.
Reading order
- Try not to add too many additional text boxes. PowerPoint files create a reading order. This is useful for allowing screen readers to move through the file reading out the next logical item in the series. Care must be taken in the design of the template so that the reading order is logical, for instance, the title of the slide is read before the main section. You can also remove decorative items from the reading order:
Text
- Left align text, without justification.
- Avoid centred text for multiple lines of text. This is where all lines of text are arranged down a centred line rather than ranged to the left.
This is
really hard to
read so please
don’t do it
- Avoid multiple columns for text (as used in newspapers).
- Lines should not be too long: 60 to 70 characters maximum.
- Use white space to remove clutter near text and group-related content.
- Apply the “6 by 7” rule: only 6 words per line and 7 lines per slide.
Font size
- 28 point is recommended as a minimum. This is complicated by the environment within which you are viewing the text. A large lecture room with a small screen will mean text will appear smaller at the back of the class.
Font typeface
- The typeface you select can have an impact on how legible and accessible your text is.
- San serif fonts are best for the web. These are without the curly elements that can lead to words being misread.
- The lowercase letter ‘a’ can be a problem because it doesn’t appear as it would be written this may be a reason to select a particular font such as Cavolini.
- Don’t use Times Roman. This can be confusing as it can join letters together making it harder to read.
- Avoid italics
- Avoid underlining – except where there are hyperlinks
- Avoid ALL CAPITALS or text That Capitalises the First Letter
Alt Text
Alt text helps people who use screen readers to understand what’s important in the visuals in your slides. Visual content includes pictures, SmartArt graphics, shapes, groups, charts, embedded objects, ink, and videos.
Use alt text to briefly describe the image, its intent, and what is important about the image. Screen readers read the description to users who can’t see the content.
Using PowerPoints ‘Design Ideas’
PowerPoint has an inbuilt tool that shows the slide creator, different slide layouts, colours, backgrounds, fonts and typefaces.
- Beware – not all of these are accessible. Although this is a step forward in terms of offering ‘good’ design to the novice slide creator there are some rules users need to be aware of, many of which are touched on in this document.
- Standard design, cognitive load and boredom threshold. Using a template may help to provide familiarity, and a sense of belonging and reduce cognitive load because the student is not required to learn the layout of the new slide. However, there is also a negative aspect that connects with ‘death by PowerPoint’ that could connect with this idea of everything looking the same. Design ideas in PowerPoint could offer a change from the norm, possibly heightening interest.
Sharing Powerpoints
- Share the file before the presentation: Sharing the file prior to the presentation is useful to allow those with a specific need to read through for preparation, to change the slides to meet their needs, or print them. The immersive reader embedded within many Microsoft products is beneficial to users who may want to adjust the text size, have the content read out, or adjust the colour settings.
- File format: Please use the original PowerPoint file format to maximise the flexibility and access to the details rather than a PDF.
Accessible Presentations
- Recording your presentation: This will allow students to review the lecture to improve understanding.
- Make it active: Consider using a classroom voting system to allow students to express perceptions around the topic, test their knowledge, or ask questions.
- Live translation: Consider turning on subtitles and alerting students to translation via mobile
Further guidance
Acknowledgement
This guide builds on elements of best practice recommended by: