Designing accessible PowerPoint presentations helps ensure that your content is clear, inclusive, and usable for all audiences, including those using screen readers or with visual, cognitive, or hearing impairments.
Design & Slide Structure
- Add unique, descriptive titles to each slide to help screen reader users navigate and understand content more easily.
- Use accessible PowerPoint templates to start with a solid foundation.
- Apply built-in slide layouts to maintain consistent reading order and structure.
- Make global design changes in Slide Master to ensure uniformity and accessibility across all slides.
- Check slide reading order to verify that screen readers will present content logically.
Color & Contrast
Sufficient contrast between text and background is essential for readability and accessibility in documents. It ensures users with low vision or color vision deficiencies can access your content effectively.
Contrast Requirements
- Maintain adequate contrast between text and background to ensure readability:
- 4.5:1 for normal text
- 3:1 for large text (18 pt or 14 pt bold)
- Graphical elements (e.g., icons, charts) should meet at least 3:1 contrast against the background.
- Avoid hard-to-read color combinations, like white text on a gold background.
- Consult the Mizzou Brand Color Guidelines to select accessible, university-approved colors.
- Check your contrast ratios using tools listed on the Check Accessibility page.
Avoid Using Color Alone
Color should never be the only method used to convey information. Supplement color with:
- Text labels
- Example: Add labels to each slice of a pie chart. (e.g., “Late – 25%”)
- Icons or symbols
- Example: Pair statuses with symbols such as red X = Late, green checkmark = Complete, and red stop sign is Canceled.
- Patterns or textures
- Example: Use fill styles in charts-stripes for “Late”, dots for “Pending” and solid fill for others.
For more details, visit: WebAIM – Contrast and Color Accessibility
Readability and Text Formatting
- Use sans serif fonts (e.g., Arial, Calibri, Helvetica).
- Set font size to 24 pt or larger.
- Be concise: use more slides with less text per slide.
- Use bulleted or numbered lists for clarity.
Links
Links should be clear, descriptive, and easy to identify. Good link text tells users where the link leads or what action it performs—especially important for screen reader users who may navigate by link text alone.
- Make link text descriptive—it should clearly explain the purpose or destination.
- Avoid vague terms like “click here,” “read more,” or “learn more.”
- Add ScreenTips for additional context.
- Watch: Add a hyperlink to a slide
Images & Alt Text
To make PowerPoint presentations accessible, add alternative (alt) text to meaningful visuals like images, icons, and charts. Alt text allows screen reader users to understand the purpose of non-text content.
- Decide whether an image is informative or decorative based on its role in the document.
- Add alternative text to a shape, picture, chart, SmartArt graphic, or other object.
- Keep alt text concise, ideally under 125 characters.
- Select the “Mark as decorative” checkbox in the Alt Text pane—this tells screen readers to skip purely decorative images.
- Avoid using images that contain text.
- Learn more: How to write effective alt text
Audio & Video
- Ensure embedded media includes closed captions or subtitles to make audio content accessible.
- Use PowerPoint’s captioning features when adding video files to your slides.
- Enable with real-time automatic captions or subtitles in PowerPoint
Check for Accessibility
It’s important to check accessibility throughout your design process—not just at the end.
- Use Microsoft’s built-in Accessibility Assistant (found under the Review tab).
- WebAIM Color Contrast Checker
- Check text and background color combinations for WCAG compliance.
- WebAIM Link Contrast Checker
- Specifically checks the contrast of links to ensure they are visually distinct from surrounding text.
- TPGi Colour Contrast Analyzer
Visit the Check for Accessibility page for a list of tools, guides, and checklists.