Skills for Access

Description

Part of Microsoft's Office suite of software, PowerPoint is a graphics package for creating digital slide-based presentations. Presentations can incorporate text, hyperlinks, tables and multimedia content such as graphics, audio, video and animations. Slideshow presentations can themselves be animated or even run automatically as stand-alone presentations without requiring a human operator.

Authoring PowerPoint presentations using the software requires comparatively little technical knowledge and no knowledge of HTML or programming languages. Presentations can be assembled using pre-defined templates that can be amended as required by authors. This makes it a popular package for rapid development of "low-fidelity" e-learning resources.

PowerPoint is available for Windows and Mac operating systems; for UNIX/Linux, other software is available to open PowerPoint files.

Accessibility Issues

As PowerPoint is most often used as part of a presentation or demonstration, accessibility issues are largely dependent on how a presenter uses PowerPoint to support their presentation. For example, a presentation with animated content or content that requires colour perception may cause access barriers for some users. Additionally, if a presenter does not describe or expand on the content of a particular slide, and relies on the audience reading the slide content, that information will not be available to anyone in the audience who has difficulty seeing the slide.

Specific problems arise when information is made available through a PowerPoint presentation on a web site or intranet, and the presentation is the only source of the information. PowerPoint is a proprietary technology and to open a PowerPoint presentation requires a user to have PowerPoint themselves. To avoid this potential problem, authors may use PowerPoint to create an HTML version of their presentation, but the nature of the software's HTML conversion feature is such that it results in a presentation completely inaccessible to screen reader users. Instead, authors wishing to make information in a PowerPoint presentation optimally accessible over the web must explore alternative means of providing the information, for example by considering alternative conversion software or providing the information in an alternative format.