Making presentations accessible – from design to delivery

Presenting is something almost all communications pros will likely need to do at some point in their career. From client pitches, to presenting data back to teams, to sharing best practice at industry events, it’s important that your slide deck, and how you deliver it, is accessible.

Things to ask before you start designing

Before you get to the actual creating part, it’s important to understand that there will be disabled and Neurodivergent people attending or watching your presentation. Accessibility and inclusion starts from way back here, that’s what we mean by accessibility as standard. Here’s what you need to consider and check at this stage:

1. If you’re using a company branded deck, have those slides been checked for accessible colour contrasts, fonts and text size? (Not sure how to check this? My accessibility tools blog has a link.)
2. Good accessibility practice is to have your slide deck available in different formats, as some people may need slides ahead of the event. Formats to consider include accessible pdf, html (e.g. hosted on a website), word document and audio files.

Consider the content of slides

Yeah, I know, obviously you’re going to think about what’s going on your actual slides. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard ‘as you can see on the chart here’, during a presentation. Or, just a slide with an image that’s never mentioned or described by the presenter. This happens because, like I said above, people generally don’t consider disability being present in their audience. This is reinforced by our assumptions that someone will tell you if they need alternative access, but there are many reasons that might not happen so it’s important we adopt responsibility for content accessibility.

1. Keep any charts and data simple and describe them. Be specific and give details. For example, “the chart on this slide is a bar chart, four black bars sit along the horizonal axis, on the vertical axis is the percentage of people who…” etc.
2. Same goes goes images, gifs, and graphics. Describe what’s on the screen.

This will feel weird at first. Describing the visuals on a slide is counterintuitive and you may feel self-conscious doing so. But imagine what it’s like to be the person watching a presentation and for once getting to understand and experience the same as other people.

To word or not to word

Everyone has different opinions on whether to put copy on slides, be it bullet points or just a few words. From an accessibility perspective, the bare minimum is to put the key takeaways from what you’re saying in a bullet list. From my lived experience of this there have been plenty of times I’ve not been able to hear the speaker (no mic, bad connection, turning away from the mic to look at a screen), but thanks to clear, succinct bullets on a slide I’ve got the gist and important info. One of the arguments I’ve seen against this is that your audience won’t be focusing on you, they’ll be reading the slides. It’s important to assume competence here. Both things are possible, one or another may be necessary depending on that individual’s needs. For example:

1. Put important statistics on the slides; percentages, data points, survey results.
2. Keep slide bullets in minimum 16pt (larger is better).
3. Bullet points should directly relate to what you’re saying verbally and keep them to one or two sentences.

Don’t wait for people to ask or hope that your presentation is inclusive. When you’re promoting it tell people the steps you’ve taken and the inclusive options available to them. From feedback, I know some people struggle with this, they don’t want people to access the slides and miss the presentation, or share the content across their network. That’s an understandable concern, but it denies disabled people their right to be included. Which is the more inclusive and ethical choice? Additionally when promoting your event make sure:

1. You include alt text and image descriptions on event promo images. If you’re asking connections and colleagues to promote the presentation provide this for them and ask them to make sure they include it.
2. You tell people how and where they can access different formats.
3. Don’t overload your posts with emojis, or put information in all caps.
4. Use Pascal Case or camelCase (why camelCase and Pascal Case are different) hashtags. For example #awesomePresenter (camelCase) #AwesomePresenter (Pascal Case)

It’s all about you

At least your introduction should be. Remember earlier in this blog I talked about describing images, gifs and charts on slides? It’s also great inclusive practice to describe yourself. I admit, this is one I’m constantly working on and have to write a note to remind myself to do. This week I was speaking at a CIPR North East online event and remembered to let people know what I looked like. It went something like this:

Hi everyone, my name’s Sara Thornhurst, my pronouns are she/her. I’m wearing a grey jumper with black stars. I have glasses on and grey hair.

Thinking back, I could have been more descriptive, but we’re aiming for progress not perfection. For people who are blind or visually impaired or who those who are dialling in on audio only it provides information on who is speaking. Self description for inclusive meetings has more information on this.

Let’s recap, or the tl:dr version

1. Disabled and Neurodivergent people are part of your audience.
2. Check and plan your accessibility at the design stage, not at delivery.
3. Make sure your post promoting your presentation or event are accessible
4. Describe yourself, describe images and gifs, describe charts and data visualisations.