TRANSCRIPT: STRUCTURING A PPT PRESENTATION

A PowerPoint presentation can be a great way to provide students with 
supplemental lecture content. 

Following several structural considerations will help ensure all of 
your students will have the ability to navigate your presentation and 
have access to all of the content on your slides.

First, use PowerPoint’s built-in slide layouts to select layouts that 
contain a title placeholder and at least one content placeholder. 

[Clicks New Slide on the Home Tab to reveal the available slide layouts. 
They are: Title Slide, Title and Content, Section Header, Two Content, 
Comparison, Title Only, Blank, Content with Caption, Picture with Caption]

Placeholders are important because the information you type in them is 
visible to all of your students, including assistive technology users. 

PowerPoint has nine built-in layouts that provide a variety of design 
options; however, one option, the Blank Layout, is not recommended for 
use in an accessible presentation. The Blank layout contains no 
placeholders and upon arriving on a blank slide, an assistive 
technology user may erroneous believe that they’ve reached the end of 
the presentation. 

All of the other slide layout options contain a title placeholder, and 
in most cases, at least one additional content placeholder that will 
allow you to type a bulleted or numbered list or perhaps embed an 
image.

Use each slide’s title placeholder to give the slide a unique title 
that relates to the content appearing on the slide. If you need more 
than one slide to cover a topic, indicate how many slides the student 
should expect within the series and the numeric order of slides within 
it. 

For example, this presentation has two slides that have the same 
title. We’ll modify the first title by adding 1 of 2 within 
parenthesis, and on the next slide, we’ll add 2 of 2. This will allow 
users of assistive technology to differentiate between these two slide 
titles.

Now, let's take a look at this presentation's structure. Click the 
View tab and select Outline View. 

[A pane containing text appears on the left side of the screen]

The title and contents of each slide appears in this pane. Notice how 
each slide’s title appears as a bold font. If I need to search for a 
particular slide, I can quickly skim the titles to find the one I need. 
A person using a screen reader is able to skim the slide titles in a 
similar way. 

When it's time to create a new slide, click New Slide and select one 
of the layouts, and if you'd like to change a slide’s layout, click 
Layout and select the desired option.

Designing a structured, accessible presentation is easy once you 
become familiar with some of PowerPoint's built-in tools for layout. 
Using slide titles, content placeholders, and reviewing your 
presentation in Outline View will result in a presentation that is more 
easily navigated by all of your students.