A repository for some Accessible Slide templates incorporating best practices for accessibility
Download the ZIP file by clicking the green "Clone or Download" button and selecting "Download ZIP". Unzip the files to an appropriate location on your computer (e.g. your "My Documents" folder). Double-click to open the template. This will start a new presentation using your chosen template. Save the presentation immediately: you will be prompted to save the presentation as a new file with an appropriate format.
Presentation accessibility is important if you want to reach the broadest possible audience. Accessible presentations mean that no one gets left out and no one misses the content you've spent so much time preparing. But creating accessible slides can be a pain, so here are some templates to get started. These templates adhere to some general guidelines:
- Use fonts 60pt or greater.
- Keep important content in the top 2/3 of the slide.
- Avoid flashes, animations, and transitions.
- Avoid content density, applied to both text and images.
- Use the "Notes" space to add descriptions of images or videos.
- Use high-contrast colorblind-appropriate color schemes.
The justifcation for these points is discussed in more detail below.
This may feel like yelling, but this guideline serves two purposes: first, it ensures that the audience at the back of the room can read your content. Second, it constrains what you can fit on a slide. Good presentations don't include walls of text or deeply nested bullet points. Let the audience pay attention to your words; you can always put extra text in the Notes section for distribution.
Note: the AlterConf guidelines (http://www.alterconf.com/speak) suggest 68pt or greater. This template uses 60 pt to allow titles to be at 72pt font. It is impractical to get much larger than 72pt font, so 60pt was chosen to allow greater size difference visibility between titles and contents.
Unless you are giving a talk in a room with stadium seating, some members of your audience are going to have their views obscured. Most often, it is the bottom 1/3 of the slide that gets obscured, and any important content you've put there is lost on the audience.
The bottom 1/3 of these templates is shaded darker. This helps give you and the audience a visual cue of where the important content should be. It's totally fine to include non-critical information here, such as footers, copyright information, proprietary notices, etc.
Just let slides move from one to the other. The audience is rarely impressed by applying a canned transition (everyone has already seen all of them!) and animations and motion can make your audience sick. It is particularly important to note that you cannot control the lighting of your environment. Some audience members may already be exerting their visual processing centers more than usual; sudden animations, blurs, transformations, and so forth can surprise them and ruin their experience. You don't want your audience to look away.
Don't have slides that say what you're already saying. Let them speak simple, key points. If slides are cluttered, then your audience is spending brainpower to process them. If the slides contain a bunch of text that you simply read, then your talk is adding nothing to your slides---the content is already being read! Again, dense content in sub-optimal lighting conditions causes people with vision impairments to struggle. This leads to headaches, nausea, eyestrain, and poor experiences all around.
Vision impaired persons attend conferences to hear speakers, but they cannot always read the slides themselves. Alternatively, people who later download your slides may not have been present to capture the context of your talk. Be sure to include "alt text" in the Notes fields in your slides, describing what the images are and what they mean so that everyon can get the full benefit of your talk, both during and after your presentation.
About 8% of XY-folks and about 0.5% of XX-folks are colorblind (colorblindness comes from a deficiency in the X-chromosome, so XX-folks have an extra X-chromosome to make up for the deficiency, leading to the lower prevalence; see https://nei.nih.gov/health/color_blindness/facts_about). It's okay (in fact it's great!) to use color contrast to convey meaning; however, consider color schemes that can be seen by folks with colorblindness. Also, be sure to educate yourself on the types of colorblindness, as there are different conditions.
Furthermore, color contrast is important. Pick fonts that have high contrast against their background. Many vision disorders include a component of contrast sensitivity---if your audience is struggling to read, they're having a bad experience. These slides are by default white-on-dark (accessible-dark) or dark-on-light (accessible-light). There is some debate as to which is best for low-light situations; however, if you keep both templates with you and use default layouts, you can easily switch at the last moment if the lighting conditions are poor!
Please contribute! If you have a preferred alternate template that you'd like to give to the world or would like to add layouts, templates for different programs/operating systems, or anything else, please feel free to submit a pull request! Just mind the Code of Conduct in discussions :)