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This blog post outlines how to make presentations (Microsoft PowerPoint) accessible. PowerPoint presentations are one of the most popular tools for learning and teaching – especially to accompany lectures.

But have you ever considered their accessibility?

In this article, we’re going to outline some tips on creating inclusive and engaging presentations in Microsoft PowerPoint. While some of the accessibility tips may seem familiar from working with text documents, we’ll also mention a few special tricks for your presentations.

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Presentation Design Fundamentals

1. Slide Layout

Most slide layouts should include a slide title, this is usually at the top of the slide. These layouts also include one or more placeholder areas where you are able to add content like images and text to a slide.

Slide titles are treated as a heading in a screen reader and will be the first thing read on each slide. If a slide has a descriptive title, it will make it easier for screen reader users to understand the context the slide.

Make sure slides are read in the order you intend using the Reading Order Pane within Microsoft PowerPoint.

Tip: Use the built-in slide designs. They are accessible, contain placeholders in a correct reading order, and predefined formatting.

2. Headings and Sub-headings

Use a unique title for each slide heading as detailed in Slide Layout above. This provides structure and assists with navigation. Headings assist screen reader users and also help with ease of navigation for all users.

The font size for headings should be minimum 36pt. Sub-headings provide additional navigation when defining a move to a different point.

This is useful when trying to get more than one point across or signals a break/change for the reader.

3. Text and Font

As with text documents use a Sans Serif font. (e.g. Arial, Calibri) as they are more accessible. These fonts are well defined and regular in shape and size and display better on computers and mobile devices.  Most popular font styles, like Tahoma or Arial, are accessible; opt for the most popular fonts rather than decorative ones.

It’s also best to keep your use of bold and italic text to a minimum

Use a minimum point size of 24 for all slide text and don’t put too much text on slides.

4. Colour and Contrast

As with text documents, do not use colour alone to convey meaning. If someone has a visual impairment, including colour blindness, the emphasis you’re trying to create by using colour will be lost.

Additionally, when you use colours, please be mindful of the colour contrast. This means the colour contrast between background and foreground content should be great enough to ensure it is legible.

If you want to check contrast, you can visit WebAIM’s Color Contrast Checker website. (Links to an external site)

Tip: You can also go to View -> Grayscale to have a quick check whether the contrast is great enough.   The images below show the same presentation in the full-colour and grayscale view.

5. Hyperlinks

When linking to a page or document via a hyperlink, use the hyperlink text to describe where the link will take the user. It is recommended that you create descriptive text about where the URL will take the user so it can be easily read by a screen reader.

For example, if you link to additional resources in your slide, avoid using “read more” or “for more info”. Also avoid underlining text for emphasis, but rather use the bold function.

6. Alternative Text

If you include an image in your presentation, if that image is essential to the context for the slide, always use alternative text (or ‘alt text’). When doing this provide a meaningful description of an image. Alt text allows screen readers and text-to-speech tools to read aloud the content of an image to the user. 

Alt text should be clear and concise (1-2 sentences) and explain the relevant content of an image. Alt text is limited to 125 characters, so use that wisely and try to describe the key elements of the image.

If your graphic has text in it, this should be added to the alt text also. Alternatively, if the text is too long to fit in the alt text box (e.g. for charts, infographics), provide a text-only version on the slide.

If an image is there only for appearance, you can mark it as decorative. For example, In Microsoft PowerPoint, select the “Mark as decorative box” when the image is selected.

7. Tables – Use for Data not Never Layouts

Tables can be great for organising information. However, if used incorrectly, they can be difficult for people to navigate using assistive technologies.

If you add a table to your document, be sure to use it for data and not for layout or document design.

For design, use the dedicated layout templates (e.g. two columns, three columns).

8. Don’t go overboard with the animations

Animations can make your presentation more engaging and are an easy tool to illustrate processes. However, don’t use animations alone to convey meaning and keep in mind that some people can get vertigo or be sensitive to flashing or rapidly moving images.

9. Accessibility Checker

Use built-in accessibility checker in PowerPoint to identify any accessibility issues in the presentation.

These tools can help identify any accessibility issues in your documents, ensuring they meet the necessary standards. They will guide you, step by step, on how to make your document more accessible.

10. Captions and Transcripts for Video

If you add videos to your presentation, you also need to make sure it’s accessible. With video content it is likely that the audio and visual content are both key to the meaning and delivery of the message.

By adding captions/subtitles will make material accessible to hearing and visually impaired users. This is also useful for users that are unable to watch video with sound.

You can also add a link to transcript or include text-only version on your next slide.

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Software Specific Guides

Microsoft PowerPoint

For specific guidance on how to make documents accessible in Microsoft PowerPoint visit the Good Practice Guide for Microsoft PowerPoint.

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Further Resources

For more information on accessibility please visit our webpages for Digital Accessibility and Universal Design.

The Vice-Chancellor’s Education Excellence Awards aim to raise the status of education at Newcastle University by rewarding individuals and teams who make a marked impact on the student educational experience.

The deadline for submission of applications is 12.00pm Wednesday 19 April 2023.

Categories and eligibility for award

The award is open to all members of staff at Newcastle, NUIS and NUMed, whose work enhances the student educational experience. In addition, applications are welcome from staff of associated employers with direct and substantive involvement in the delivery of the student experience at Newcastle (e.g. staff of INTO Newcastle University). Groups of colleagues who work closely together are invited to apply for the team award. 

Up to five awards will be made across the following two categories:

Category one: Individual award 

• Individual members of staff (academic or professional) whose contribution to education at Newcastle is exceptional.

Category two: Team award

• Teams of staff (either academic or professional services staff, or teams consisting of both) whose contribution to education at Newcastle is exceptional.

Documentation to support your application Documentation and guidance notes are available on the Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle website. Please contact ltds@ncl.ac.uk  if you have any questions.

Are you interested in student co-creation but unsure of the benefits, how to get involved or where to start?

If so, you might be interested in reading my review of the recent AdvanceHE symposium on Student Co-creation, which includes highlights from the event, variations and benefits of student co-creation, scholarship and the student’s voice.

The day was packed with insightful, exciting and innovative talks from international colleagues and students across the HE Sector. There was such an exciting buzz in the air all day and you couldn’t help but admire the enthusiasm from students passionate about working with educators and developing agency in their own learning experiences.   

Keynote Speaker: Catherine Bovill, University of Edinburgh

The day began with Catherine talking passionately about ‘The transformational potential of co-creation from a classroom perspective both in person and online. She spoke of the many variations of student co-creation, highlighting some of her own research and scholarship along the way. Catherine shared a Co-creation of learning & teaching typology (Bovill 2019) which identifies how you might initiate co-creation, within what context and whether those sorts of activities are staff-led, student-led or both – some included in the table below:

Interestingly, this research mainly focused on students co-creating when they are already part of a programme or module – with activities such as co-creating assessments, designing essay questions or working with students to co-design what might be taught in coming weeks.

From the research undertaken by Catherine, and other scholars she mentioned, there are clearly a lot of benefits of student co-creation for students and staff, some of which I’ve noted below:

• Increased student engagement and motivation for learning
• Increased meta-cognitive awareness, sense of identity and belonging  
• Enhancements in teaching and classroom experience
• Enhanced academic performance
• Transformation in assessment performance and less focus on grades and more on learning
• Enhanced feelings of belonging, feeling valued
• More culturally responsive and inclusive
• Liberating for teachers
• Increased confidence through relationship building and trust

For me that last point on relationship building and developing trust are the key ingredients to any form of curriculum co-creation, whether that’s student-staff co-creation or staff-staff co-creation, both require positive relationships but also build positive relationships – which then leads to all those other benefits above!

Bovill, C. (2020) Co-creating learning and teaching: towards relational teaching in higher education. St Albans: Critical Publishing.Bovill, C. (2019)

A co-creation of learning and teaching typology: what kind of co-creation are you planning or doing? International Journal for Students as Partners3 (2) 91-98: https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v3i2.3953

Student Co-creation at Newcastle

As my role focuses on working with specific programme teams to redesign or design new curricula, I was interested in finding out how colleagues across the sector have engaged students in new programme design – a particular challenge when students aren’t already invested in the programme. I managed to catch Catherine during a coffee break to chat about this and was comforted that this isn’t just a challenge for us, it’s a sector-wide challenge. From our chat I’ve identified some approaches that we could use at Newcastle:

• Extend Staff Student Committees (SSCs) to include curriculum design conversations
• Involve your Student Union in discussions
• Organise staff, student and graduate panel discussions as part of the curriculum review process
• Provide money incentives – involve students from the outset through schemes such as Jobs on Campus
• Provide other incentives – if the budget doesn’t stretch to Jobs on Campus, would a Digital Badge incentivise students to get involved? There is robust meta-data behind these badges that employers recognise as authentic
• Gain recognition – Student co-creators often meet the criteria for Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA)

What I realised from this symposium, and from being around all these enthusiastic students, is students are eager to get involved in shaping their own education. Student co-creation in any variation can have positive benefits not just for the students and educators but for the University as a whole.

Excitingly, we also had representation for Newcastle University at the AdvanceHE symposium. Helen Elliott, our Student Experience Manager and Meg Hardiman a second-year student in English Literature with Creative Writing, presented their work on  ‘Why Can’t Module Choice be More like Netflix?’

Their work focused on finding out what information students need to make a confident choice during module selection. A student co-creation project that used Agile Methodologies.  

Here at Newcastle, we have some great examples of student co-creation:

Working in partnership: tackling sustainability challenges with a student-led virtual event

Co-design Sprint: An approach to engage students in the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Students as partners in learning

In LTDS we are working on developing support and guidance on student co-creation and would love to include some of your case studies, so if you have examples do get in touch ltds@ncl.ac.uk  

Parallel sessions – what stood out!

There were of course many other motivating and interesting sessions at the Student Co-creation symposium. I was particularly inspired by the student co-creation examples from The University of Manchester, and the University of Dundee.

Dr Nicholas Weise (Senior Lecturer / Teaching & Learning Enhancement Lead –Department of Chemistry) shared their approach to co-creating the curriculum with Commuter students (a student group that has lower rates of progression and success than other student groups) so that they feel less isolated, feel seen and heard and are able to engage in more social and networking opportunities. Through a flipped teaching environment students were given the opportunity to co-design active learning sessions and have a voice in designing aspects of the curriculum, such as learning outcomes, lecture content, and formative and summative assessments. What really caught my attention was how they rewarded and recognised student contributions.  The University of Manchester has set up a programme, the Leadership in Education Awards Programme (LEAP) for all students (UG, PGT and PGR) and is supporting students, involved in co-designing curriculum, to gain recognition as Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).  

Dr James Brooks (Senior Lecturer in Electrical Engineering and the Academic Lead for Pedagogy within Science and Engineering) at Manchester University talked about student involvement in co-designing a course from scratch with student partners. The extent of the involvement in the co-design had real positive impacts on the students, their experience and their grades. James’ students gave summaries of past material in the lectures, live constructive criticism of the lecture, and formal and informal peer feedback on assessments. They co-designed the marking criteria in the lectures, specified the grade descriptors in the lectures and created learning materials to evidence their learning – some really great examples of engaging students in their own learning experiences and assessments!

Dr Paul Campbell (Physics Division, University of Dundee) perhaps won the award for the most innovative and fun example of student co-creation (there wasn’t actually an award for that but he’d of won, I’m sure 😊). Inspired some time ago by The Apprentice, students on a Physic module are tasked with working in groups (typically of 5 or 6 students) to:

• Develop a 4/5 minute YouTube video that ‘informs, educates and entertains’* on one aspect of this module.
• Exercise represents 10% of the overall module score.
• Hard deadline set at the last scheduled class slot of that 11 week academic term.
• Marking scheme provided [including a peer assessment component].
• Students then take complete creative control.  

Students really got creative with these videos and had lots of fun, and the benefits were clear, including:

• Improved Subject Attainment.
• Enhanced Student Experience.
• Enhanced employability (URL link to CV).
• Cultivation of true team working and identification of distinct employment roles.

There are also a lot of benefits for educators:

• Improved attainment.
• Inexpensive in terms of facilitation of kit and time investment.
• Fabulous recruitment tool.
• Facilitates true insight to both academic and character traits that serve towards generating accurate job references with demonstrable excellence.
• Also serves towards the development of rapport and enhanced confidence in the senior phase

Take look at one of the videos on Youtube and see what you think!

Thanks for taking the time and reading my blog post on student co-creation. Please get in touch if you are interested in chatting about student co-creation or in sharing your practice!

Michelle Barr, Learning Design & Curriculum Development Advisor (LTDS)