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How To PowerPoint Topics: Accessibility Wizard | HTML

Students Affected:

Principles: Provide Meaningful Alternatives, Degrade Gracefully

What It Means

The Microsoft Office Web Publishing Accessibility Wizard is the quickest and easiest way to create accessible versions of PowerPoint slides. However, if you cannot use this plug-in (it is not available for Mac users) you can create an HTML version of your presentation and post it online.

If You Do It Wrong: Your presentation is unreadable by students who use screen readers or who do not have PowerPoint installed on their computers.

If You Do It Right: All students can review an accessible HTML version of the presentation.

How It Works

Use HTML or a Web page editor (e.g. Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver, or Netscape Composer) to build an online version of your presentation.

Do not use the Save as Web Page feature built into PowerPoint. The HTML files generated by PowerPoint include serious accessibility errors that take a great deal of time and effort to fix.

To create a simple Web page:

1. Copy the text from each slide or the outline and paste it into one basic Web page (make sure you follow the guidelines in the How To: Web Pages section of this Web site).
   
   
2. Check the HTML version against the slides in your presentation. Several PowerPoint elements are not automatically copied, such as:
   
   • Content in text boxes,
     
   • Graphics and any related alt text,
     
   • Scripting and interactivity.
     
3. Add alt text and long descriptions as necessary. (To learn more, visit the How To: Images section of this Web site.)
   
   
4. Review the content to make sure it is logically organized and makes sense.
   
   

You will lose the slide colors and graphics, but the content is accessible.

To create a more complicated presentation:

1. Create an accessible HTML page for each slide, including all colors and images (make sure you follow the guidelines in the How To: Web Pages and How To: Images sections of this Web site).
   
   
2. Add alt text and long descriptions as necessary. (To learn more, visit the How To: Images section of this Web site.)
   
   
3. Link the HTML pages together with an effective navigation structure.
   
   

This option requires more effort, but it allows you to maintain the text formatting and the divisions between slides.

You can learn more about HTML versions of PowerPoint slides in the WebAIM PowerPoint tutorial.

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