Accessible Presentations Guide
Accessible presentations enhance the experience for everyone in your audience, including people with disabilities. Important considerations are presentation materials (such as PowerPoint slides), presentation structure, presentation format, and the needs of your audience.
Quick Tips
Presentation Materials
Headings
- Heading structure (H1, H2, etc.) should be used for documents (Word, Google Docs, PDFs) and websites.
- Slides require unique titles for each slide. For example:
- Headings
- Headings (continued)
Or
- Headings
- Headings (2)
- Headings (3)
Images
- Always add alt text to images in your presentation.
- Alt text is text that describes the meaningful content of an image to someone who cannot see it and is read by assistive technology.
- How to write alt text
- Do not use images of text, as they cannot be read by assistive technology and do not magnify properly.
- Learn more about image accessibility
Color
- Ensure your presentation meets color contrast standards for both text and visuals.
- Use a color contrast checker
- Follow color contrast standards
- Do not use color alone to convey meaning.
- For example, charts and graphs need text labels in addition to color coding.
- Avoid inaccessible color combinations.
- For example, red and green together can be difficult to differentiate for some types of color blindness.
Text
- Use fonts that are easy to read and sans serif (such as Roboto or Arial).
- Size:
- Body text font size should be 18 or larger.
- Heading text font size should be 24 or larger.
- Do not use only visual styling (such as bold) to convey information to your audience.
- For example, if you would like to bold a sentence to emphasis its importance, add a note to the beginning of the sentence such as "Important: this is bold text."
Links
- Use descriptive link text instead of a URL.
- For example, CU Anschutz Homepage instead of https://www.cuanschutz.edu/
- Exception: if you do not share your presentation materials with your audience, then include the URL so your audience can still access the link.
- Write link text so that your audience understands what the link is and where it will take them.
- Never use general link text like "Click here".
- How to write descriptive link text
- Underlined text should only be used to indicate a link.
Presentation Structure
- Share your presentation materials in advance, if possible.
- This helps your audience follow along and prepare for your presentation.
- This supports cognitive disabilities, such as ADHD, and physical disabilities, such as vision impairments.
- Provide an agenda at the beginning of your presentation so your audience knows what to expect.
- Verbally describe non-decorative visuals included in your presentation (such as charts).
- Discuss what the visual is showing and why it is important.
Virtual Presentations
- Consider the accessibility of the presentation platform. Zoom is one recommended option at CU Anschutz.
- Turn on automated captioning at minimum.
- Provide human-created live captioning for accommodation requests and public live-streamed events.
- Read aloud comments and questions in the chat.
- Allow your audience to participate in multiple modalities.
- For example, use both chat and unmute, rather than requiring one modality over the other.