TRANSCRIPT FOR COLLAPSING A MULTI-LAYERED IMAGE IN POWERPOINT

When addressing the accessibility of a custom graphic, such as an image created 
by adding shapes and lines to a slide in PowerPoint, you might realize upon 
opening the Accessibility Checker that the graphic you've created is actually 
many layers of content. 

When assistive technology, such as a screen reader, comes to this slide, it 
will access each object, one at a time, to read each one's alternative text. 

You could spend time writing alternative text for each item you've placed on 
the slide. You'd need to be careful and very granular about what you say, 
because out of context of the larger image, hearing that this is a triangle or 
that this is an arrow won't make much sense to someone unable to see the image. 

What you really need in this situation is for the assistive technology user to 
have access to a single image, just as what a visual learner would see, so what 
we'll need to do is collapse these many layers into a single image.

There's a couple of ways you can do that, but here's the quickest. 

We'll start with the slide that contains our creation, then we'll go to File 
and Save As. Pick a location for the image to go, give it a name, and then for 
the type of file, locate and select PNG (which is a type of image file). 

Click Save and PowerPoint will ask you if you want to save all of your slides 
as PNG files or is it just this one you'd like to save. We'll select Just This 
One, and PowerPoint creates the image file. 

Now, back in PowerPoint, my original creation can be deleted, but if you think 
you might need to edit your custom graphic in the future, it’ll be a good idea 
to keep it in a separate file from the presentation you'll share with your 
students. That way an assistive technology user will not inadvertently access 
that slide.

In our example, we're done with the graphic, so we'll delete it by selecting 
the slide and pressing Delete on the keyboard. On a new slide, I'll click the 
Pictures icon and locate the PNG file we saved earlier.

Now, we're ready to give this single image an alternative text that would be 
suitable for replacing the whole image, rather than many pieces of it.