New PowerPoint Accessibility

Best practices

Most accessibility issues in PowerPoint presentations are not intentional. They come from design habits: typing the title into a text box dropped at the top of the slide, starting from a blank slide and placing each block by hand, lining up text boxes by eye to imitate a table. On screen, each of these actions gives the right result. In practice, each one strips the presentation of the structure that assistive technologies rely on.

This section reviews the most common elements of a PowerPoint presentation. For each one, it identifies the tool that produces an accessible result and the one that produces the same visual result without the underlying structure – the second route being almost always the quickest, and therefore the most instinctive.

On this page

Most-used elements

  • Slide titles
  • Slide layouts and placeholders
  • Body text and bulleted content
  • Images, icons and screenshots
  • Charts and SmartArt
  • Tables
  • Free-floating text boxes and shapes
  • Embedded video and audio
  • Animations and slide transitions
  • Hyperlinks
  • Speaker notes
  • Slide numbers and footers
  • The slide master and theme
  • Grouped objects and diagrams
  • Section dividers

Do’s and don’ts

Accessibility best practices for a presentation: accessible approach and practice to avoid for each element
Element Accessible approach Avoid
Slide titles A real title placeholder on every slide, with unique wording; hidden visually if the design requires it No title, a title typed into a free text box, or the same title repeated across many slides
Slide structure Built-in layouts from Home > Layout, with content typed into placeholders Blank layout plus manually drawn text boxes
Body content The content placeholder’s own bullet levels (Tab to demote) Manually typed dashes, or separate text boxes per line
Images Alt text via right-click > View Alt Text; decorative images marked as decorative No alt text, filename alt text, or unedited auto-suggestions
Charts & SmartArt One summary alt text on the whole object, plus data labels so colour is not the only cue Colour-only legends and no alt text
Tables Insert > Table with a header row, kept simple and small Merged cells, or a table used to lay out a slide
Reading order Reading Order pane (Review > Check Accessibility) to set the sequence explicitly Leaving the order to whatever the objects were drawn in
Video & audio Closed captions attached via Playback > Insert Captions, plus a transcript Uncaptioned speech, or autoplay with no way to stop it
Motion Subtle transitions, no auto-advance, nothing flashing Auto-advancing timings, looping motion, flashing builds
Hyperlinks Descriptive display text naming the destination “Click here” or a raw pasted URL
Speaker notes Extended description of complex visuals, as a supplement Essential information that appears nowhere else
Text over images Solid or heavily darkened overlay behind the text Text placed straight onto a photograph
Colour & contrast 4.5:1 minimum for body text, checked against the actual theme colours Brand palette applied without testing, or pale text on light fills
Font size Large enough for the room – typically 18pt minimum for body text 10-12pt body text carried over from a document
Deck settings Language set via Review > Language, and a Title filled in under File > Info Both left at their defaults
Global styling Changes made once in View > Slide Master The same manual fix repeated on every slide