Use slide masters in Powerpoint

To ensure users can navigate and understand the nature of your digital content it is important that you use accessible font sizes, colours and so on, on your slides. Whilst PowerPoint does not allow you to specify headings you can ensure a good level of accessibility by providing consistency in content and ensuring a logical tab order. You can achieve consistency by using ‘slide masters’ – these are pre-defined layouts and styles for slides, to accommodate a wide range of digital content you may have.

Tab order can be set using the ‘Selection pane’ – tab order follows the elements listed from bottom to top. If you do not have a defined PowerPoint template, ask your design team to create one for you.

Techniques

Select the most appropriate slide layout from the ‘Layouts’ menu

The currently layout is highlighted; clicking on a different layout will change the appearance of the current slide.

The layout menu, with various slide layout options, in the ribbon at the top of Microsoft PowerPoint — Figure 1

Tab order is set using the ‘Selection pane’

The selected object is highlighted in the selection pane; you can drag this up and down the order or use the buttons in the ribbon to move up or down the order. Tab order follows the elements listed from bottom to top.

The PowerPoint application with the selection pane open, showing an ordered list of every object and highlighting the currently selected object.

Use slide masters in Powerpoint

Web Accessibility Techniques

Techniques

Select the most appropriate slide layout from the ‘Layouts’ menu

Tab order is set using the ‘Selection pane’

References

WCAG 2.1

EN 301 549 v 2.1.2