Slides

Presentation slides need to made as accessible as possible for your audience, both in terms of viewing them on a screen, when printed and during the delivery of the session where the slides are used.

The UCL Office 365 Accessibility portal provides information on the accessibility tools available in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Word, Excel and PowerPoint and includes links to accessible templates.

Digital Skills Development offer a Creating accessible PowerPoint presentations course.

Creating slides

Structure and layout

• Use standard Slide Layouts. Avoid adding additional text boxes other than the ones that are part of the Slide Layout you have chosen.
• Use Outline View to check the reading order of the objects on your slides. By default this will match the order you created the objects in, which is not necessarily the logical order. All slide text should be visible in Outline View.
• Use the Notes Field in PowerPoint to provide the key information relating to each slide. This makes things easier for screen-reader users, but will improve readability for everyone.  

Alignment and spacing

• Use at least 1.0 of spacing between lines.
• Use the Paragraph Formatting feature to create space rather than using the Return key.

Fonts and formatting

• Choose sans serif fonts and ensure font size is large enough (at least 24 is recommended and 45 for titles).
• Use bullet points, preferably no more than four per slide.
• End all your sentences and any list items with a full stop or semi-colon.

Use of colour

• Ensure there is sufficient contrast between the font colour and the background colour. For example, black font on a cream or yellow background is a good contrast. Extreme contrast such as black font on a white background is best avoided.
• Avoid backgrounds with a lot of patterns.
• Do not use color as the ONLY way to convey content or meaning, for example using red to convey important points.

See the Visuals and use of colour page for more details on using colour in your content.

Multimedia

• Avoid animations and sounds if they are not crucial to the content of the presentation.
• Use alternative text for tables, charts, figures, images etc.

See the Visuals and use of colour page for more details on using images in your content.

Hyperlinks

Use descriptive words for hyperlinks rather than actually displaying the web address or a generic 'Click here' or similar. For example:
'Visit the Accessibility fundamentals page for more details about descriptive hyperlinks.'

Writing style and content

• Ensure that each slide has a unique Title.
• Avoid long sentences and use words and phrases that best suit your audience. Use the Notes area for fuller details rather than trying to put everything on the slide.
• Embed content from Word, Excel etc. rather than copying and pasting it.
• If using tables, use a simple table structure, and specify column header information.

Templates and themes

• Choose a template or theme that is accessible.
• There is more information about accessible themes on the Microsoft page Make your PowerPoint presentations accessible to people with disabilities

Printing and sharing

• Print no more than two slides per page.
• Use uncoated, matt paper to avoid glare and ensure that it is thick enough so that print from one side doesn’t show through to the other. 90 gsm or more is recommended.
• If you are providing an electronic copy of your slides, make sure they can be edited so that people can adapt them to meet their needs (e.g. change the colours).

Presenting

Try to audio describe all of the meaningful visual elements in your slides when you are presenting. For example, don't just say 'as you can see this graph shows a busy month on the stock exchange'. Try to bring the meaning of the visual elements (e.g. graph, charts, and diagrams) to life for people in the audience who may not be able to see the images. So, if the learning objective of including a graph is to clearly show fluctuations in the UK stock market, then describe the graph with appropriate levels of audio description to make this clear e.g. 'This line graph shows that stock prices for the first quarter of 2023 went up by 10% in January, then slowed in February at 12%, dropped a little to 11 % in March before falling to the previous year's levels in April at 8%.' This is good practice and will bring visual elements to life by making the meaning of all aspects of your slides communicable to everyone.

Creating PDFs

For details about creating accessible PDFs from Word visit the PDF documents page.

Delivering presentations

Refer to our page on Face-to-face sessions for information on how to make your delivery more accessible.

Check for accessibility

The Accessibility Checker in PowerPoint will help to ensure that your slides are more accessible. 

Find out more

• Digital Skills Development offer a Creating accessible PowerPoint presentations course.
• The UCL Office 365 Accessibility portal provides information on the accessibility tools available in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Word, Excel and PowerPoint and includes links to accessible templates.
• Accessibility Checklists - Powerpoint and Video Accessibility checklists put together by two Connected Learning Interns at the Ear Institute. For the active checking off, we've taken a quiz and forced it to behave like like a tick list - there are standard Word versions too. 
• UCL’s Moodle course Accessible Teaching Practices: Providing Access to All using Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provides more detailed guidance on how to create accessible PowerPoint slides.

Back to creating accessible content