I want to make my Powerpoint Slides accessible.
For this, I use the AccessibilityChecker feature.
It tells me that I should check the reading order of some slides:
And here's how it tells me to fix it:
The problem is: I don't really seem to have an option to mark a slide as "fixed". So the more slides I have like this, the more problems are reported, and I will always have to check back again to ensure that I didn't miss one of them. It would be great to be able to just mark a checkbox like "Solved", so I only see new slides (or changed ones) popping up as possible problems.
The AccessibilityChecker also tells me, that if I use a layout slide, this won't be a problem. But often there's no appropriate layout slide, and as soon as I'm inserting an image by copy&paste, the hint is displayed in the AccessibilityChecker.
So I tried creating a custom layout slide, and indeed, this doesn't trigger the hint! But I don't want to create a layout slide for each custom slide I need...
So is there any other way to solve this problem?
I have uploaded the presentation so you can check yourself:
slide 4 and 5 look identical, but while slide 4 was built in a custom way, slide 5 is built using a layout slide. Other than that, I don't see a difference. But the AccessibilityChecker only complains for slide 4.
1 Answer
If you enter text into placeholders provided by the master slide/layout, you can be certain of the reading order of the text. If you enter text by creating text boxes, the reading order may not be what you expect it to be (it'll depend on the order in which you entered the text), but as long as it's in the correct order, it's no less accessible than text in placeholders.
You can easily check the order: click off the slide so that nothing's selected, then press TAB to select each shape in turn. The order in which shapes are selected will be the order in which their text (if any) is read by accessibility technology.
PPT has no direct way of tracking which slides have changed so I guess you're stuck with clicking through the whole presentation when you do an accessibility check.
I don't have the Mac handy right now, but I wonder if you can check just a subset of slides by selecting them in sorter view before running the accessibility check. Worth a try ...
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