An understanding has grown over the years to make all kinds of computer-generated content available to people with
disabilities. PowerPoint is no stranger to this accessibility concept, and has many options up its sleeve that help your slides
be more relevant to those with accessibility impairments.
PowerPoint's built-in Accessibility Checker works similar to the
spell checker. It highlights potential
accessibility issues in your presentation so that you can fix these potential problems and make your content accessible to
everyone. Note that fixing some issues might require that you change, reformat or otherwise update your content. Also, the
Accessibility Checker also lets you know about application features that you can use to make your content more accessible.
Note: There might be issues that you choose not to fix, since your audience may not
contain people with certain disabilities. In that case, you can treat some highlighted issues as informative, and act only on
the issues that you consider significant.
Follow these steps to explore the Check Accessibility option in
PowerPoint 2016:
- Launch PowerPoint, and open any existing presentation for which you want to check accessibility issues. If you made any
changes to your slides, do save your presentation before you proceed further.
-
Access the File menu, and choose the Info Pane to get to
Backstage view, as shown in
Figure 1. Thereafter, select the Check for Issues option, as shown highlighted in
red within Figure 1.
Figure 1: Info Pane within the Backstage view
- This brings up a small drop-down menu as shown in Figure 2. From the drop-down menu select the
Check Accessibility option, highlighted in red within Figure 2.
Figure 2: Check Accessibility option
- This opens the Accessibility Checker
Task Pane, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Accessibility Checker Task Pane
The Accessibility Checker checks your presentation against a set of possible issues in your slides that users
with disabilities might experience in your slides. Each issue is classified as an Error, a
Warning, or a Tip:
Error: For content that makes a file very difficult or impossible for people with disabilities to
understand.
Warning: For content that in most, but not all cases makes a file difficult for people with disabilities
to understand.
Tip: For content that people with disabilities can understand, but that might be better organized or
presented in a way that would maximize their experience.
- Now, click on an issue to see detailed information specific to the selected issue. These details show in the
Additional Information section, right at the bottom of the Accessibility Checker Task Pane,
highlighted in red within Figure 4. Within this section, you can read guidelines
and steps that will help you fix or revise the content to make it more accessible.
Figure 4: Additional Information section
- Make corrections and changes as required. You can run the Accessibility Checker again to determine if all
issues are resolved or not. Once done, make sure you save the presentation.
See Also:
Check Accessibility in PowerPoint 2013 for
Windows
Check Accessibility in PowerPoint
2010 for Windows
