Doug Abrams: Hello everyone. And welcome to, can everybody see my screen. My name is Doug Abrams and I'm an accessibility engineer with TPGi. A quick disclosure to start out, today we're going to be discussing how to present information on a digital platform in a more inclusive manner. We will be touching a little on the accessibility of PowerPoint slides, but we won't be covering accessibility of communication platforms, themselves, i.e teams, zoom, et cetera. That's a topic deserving its own webinar. So apologies if that's what you came here for. But if we get a lot of positive feedback after today's session, maybe we can have an additional webinar in the future to explore that topic. Also, I realized that this is a topic that impacts all people. But today we are only going to focus on people with visual disabilities, such as complete blindness, low vision, et cetera. Doug Abrams: We could spend a full day talking about how digital presentation impacts everybody. But today we can only have an hour. So we do have to narrow the scope of the conversation just a bit. Moving the slide to a quick bit of information about me. I graduated from Georgia tech with a bachelor's degree in computational media, which blends computer science with digital media and human interaction. My background is in front end development. And about six years ago, while working as a developer I was first introduced to the realm of accessibility. Sadly like many of us, it was due to a lawsuit, but I quickly became an advocate and tried to push for accessibility across all things my team built. In 2018, I received my web accessibility specialist credential through IAAP. And in 2020, I moved to TPGi as an accessibility engineer so I could work on accessibility full time. Doug Abrams: Moving on to slide three here's just a quick look at our agenda for the next hour or so. First a brief intro into why inclusivity in communication is important for people with visual disabilities and a deeper dive into some of the barriers that people may encounter. Next we'll walk through a few examples, good and bad for describing visual information. Then we'll talk a little bit about some techniques for making your PowerPoint deck more accessible. After that, we'll talk a bit more about why this is so relevant in today's world. And lastly, we'll hopefully leave a good amount of time for any questions you may have. And if we run out of time, we'll be sure to follow up on any unanswered questions after today's session is over. Doug Abrams: All right, moving on to slide four, the way we present information can be a major barrier to those with visual disabilities, such as low vision or complete blindness. People who are blind will not be able to see the slide information. So if you're presenting with the assumption that people can see your screen, some of the material is guaranteed to be missed. People of low vision may have trouble perceiving all of the slide content because of the way presentation platforms like zoom and teams shrink the size of the screen share if attendees are not viewing them in full screen mode. Accounting for these barriers can be beneficial to those without disabilities as well. For example, people who are multitasking during the call, not that any of us ever do that may understand information being communicated much better when we describe the content more thoroughly. Doug Abrams: In addition, people with an auditory learning style will take away more meaningful information from your presentation. Moving to slide five, what are some of those barriers that we alluded to? Well in general, they can be summarized into a few categories. For people with no vision, barriers include visual information that is not spoken by the presenter, unnecessary information that is spoken by the presenter, audience reactions and complex visual information. That's not accurately or completely spoken by the presenter. For people with low vision, common barriers include things like illegible fonts, small print, poor contrast, or too much visual clutter. Now let's dive into each of these a little deeper Doug Abrams: Moving to slide six, any unspoken information that is included in your slides content is likely to be missed. This can include anything from slide text to important graphics. Now this doesn't mean you need to read every word on the slide verbatim. Any public speaking teacher will tell you that's not a great way to present. What you should strive for is verbally communicating all of the same ideas that are on the slide. One example of that we often don't consider is when slide transitions are used to convey meaning. Here's an example of a, who wants to be a millionaire style question with four possible answers on screen, which Disney character famously leaves a glass slipper behind at a Royal ball? A, Pocahontas, B Aurora, C, Cinderella, or D Elsa. Now let's say we use a slide transition to remove three of the four answers, so that only the correct one is left on screen. Doug Abrams: If I, as the presenter, do not verbally announce the right answer, I'm relying on an assumption that everyone in attendance can infer the answer based on a visual cue. People who can't see my screen at the moment won't know the correct answer. Moments like this can be very frustrating. Not only will people not have access to information, but it can also leave them feeling very left out. It's also worth noting that using too many transitions, such as each bullet flying onto the screen individually can make it more difficult for screen reader users to go back and read through the PowerPoint later. So be sure to use them sparingly when possible. The answer by the way is C, Cinderella. Another thing that can cause a barrier for people who are completely blind is when you include videos with no accompanying audio or animations that are conveying information visually. Often in these scenarios, I'll see the presenter hit play, and then there will just be silence until it's over. Doug Abrams: Be sure to describe whatever is being shown in the video. So everyone can fall along with what's happening. Moving to slide seven, for anyone who's familiar with the idea of alt text and decorative images in web accessibility, this next section should sound familiar. We often add extra visual decoration in order to make our slides more appealing to look at. In presentation these usually take the form of extra graphics or decorative shapes. And just like on the web, we don't want to announce unnecessary content. Doing so would be irrelevant to the idea we're trying to convey and can distract from the point you're trying to make. The same can be said about overly explaining literal details about how the slide looks. I don't need to say in the corner of this slide is our company logo showing the letters TPGi where the letter I is shaped to look like a person. And during a doorway the doorway is colored orange and yellow. Doug Abrams: Again, those details though present are not relevant to the idea that I'm trying to get across. So how do you decide if something is decorative or not? In this context, I would consider something decorative if it's visual information that when removed from the slide would not change the overall meaning of the information being presented. For example, on the current slide, if I were to remove the eyeball icon and blue Stripe from the left side of the screen, the information I'm trying to convey would not change. I would consider these elements decorative. And were I not trying to illustrate an example of decorative content I would typically not mention them at all. Doug Abrams: Whenever you're presenting, ask yourself the question. What is the idea I'm trying to convey? If the element in question do not contribute to that idea, then it's probably okay to omit them when talking. While we're on the topic of decorative content, I will also mention that some screen readers have worse compatibility than others when it comes to ignoring decorative content in PowerPoint. In fact, I recently had to open a bug with the JAW screen reader because the version I have was announcing all of the shapes that were marked as decorative and PowerPoint, which was terrible. In general, it's a good idea to minimize the amount of decorative stuff on the slide anyway, but because of bugs like this, there can also be adverse effects on screen reader users. If someone is reading through the slides after the fact, then they may have to trudge through all the extra garbage being announced as decorative, instead of ignored. Doug Abrams: Moving to slide eight occasionally on smaller calls where everyone isn't muted by default and can chime in freely, people may react to something that they saw on screen. It may be laughter or just a comment about something visual. These reactions often go unexplained, which can leave some people wondering what just happened. I saw this happen once with someone on the about me slide of their presentation. After about a second of the slide showing a few people started going Aw, and no headed comments were made before the presenter moved on. You can imagine how confusing that would've been for anyone who couldn't see the cute image of them with their new puppies on screen. So as the presenter, it's important that we pay attention to our audience. Because sometimes things being said, come from other audience members, not from you. Another great exam of this is during Q&A. Doug Abrams: And please everyone call me out on this if I do it at the end of the presentation. Too many times I will see people answer questions from a chat window or that were otherwise inaudible without actually repeating the question first. Odds are, you don't have any jeopardy champions in the audience, so they probably need to hear both the question and the answer. Moving on to slide nine, one of the more challenging scenarios is when your slide has visual information that is highly complex. For example, what if my slide has a data table or things like charts and graphs? When is it too much detail versus not enough detail? Especially in a corporate environment, I used to run into this situation all the time. I used to refer to really bad cases as iCharts and apologize to attendees when I moved to those slides. Doug Abrams: Because even as a cited person, you wouldn't be able to understand what was going on. And in some cases it would even just hurt to look at. We often get into bad habits of trying to cram as much as we possibly can into a single slide, but in the end, instead of conveying more information, we just end up making it harder for our audience to understand and remember because so much is being given to them at once. As a general rule, I like to follow the one idea per slide approach. So we don't run into these information overload scenarios. That's where each slide conveys a single idea that can be summarized in the slide title. The slide content enforces that idea. And if you find that you need to break up the slide into multiple subsections with implicit headings in order to do so, then you're probably dealing with multiple ideas that should be split into separate slides. Doug Abrams: Let's look at an example through the lens of someone who can't see. I am going to pause my screen share for a moment. And I'm going to try to describe the next slides content in a few different ways. As I do I want you to think about whether it answers the question, what is everyone's favorite food. Example one, a pie chart with four slices, colored blue, green, red, and gray showing people's favorite foods. Example two, we surveyed a bunch of people and as you can see, there's a big gap between pizza and burgers. Okay, now I'm going to start sharing again, starting at slide 10. Example one was unhelpful because it includes non-important details such as the chart colors, which don't reinforce the point being made. It states the topic of the chart without giving any details on the data. Doug Abrams: You probably weren't able to answer my question about the favorite food. Any insights being pulled from the data will not be apparent unless you can visually examine that chart in real time. Example two was unhelpful because the purpose of the chart wasn't very clear. It makes a statement that can only be enforced by looking at the chart. The information given doesn't tie back to the original question of which food was everyone's favorite. A better way to describe this could be a pie chart measuring people's favorite foods. Pizza is favored the most by 40% of people's surveyed. Burgers are next at 25%. Pasta is third at 10%. All others make up the remaining 25%. This is more useful because it gives the purpose of the chart upfront. It includes all of the detail that's conveyed visually. And the order in which the detail is given is in a descending order. Doug Abrams: This makes it easier to conceptualize and if the order given was random. Now I'm not saying that this is the only way that I could explain this chart. One important thing to remember is that context matters. So more or less detail than what I just said could be necessary. Remember, the question I asked was what is everyone's favorite food? If that really was the only important piece of information that I needed people to take away, then I could have left out some of the data points other than pizza. But I would want to make sure that those details are available in the slides, in an accessible manner for anyone who wants to go back later and look at them. By the way, I didn't actually do a food survey. Doug Abrams: These numbers were made up for today. So don't be offended if you're a pasta lover. I am too. Moving on to slide 11, let's talk more about some of the common issues for people who can see the screen share to some extent. How can we make sure that the content is easy for them to read? Well, first don't use fonts that have irregular or extremely thin weights. And just like on the web San Serif Fonts are generally going to be easier to read. I feel like at this point that's a pretty well known usability best practice for digital content anyway. System fonts like Arial are going to be your best friend. Next is font size. It's hard to say how small is too small when it comes to font size. Since there are so many variables once the content hits a screen share. Without a more thorough study, I can't really say for sure where that line is, but I would argue that if you're using the sizing and PowerPoint, anything under the 18 to 24 range may start to get difficult to read. Doug Abrams: Third is color. WCAG gives us a pretty reliable way of measuring color contrast. It uses a calculation which takes in the foreground and background colors of the content and gives a ratio of the two. We can compare that ratio to a predefined threshold to gauge whether or not contrast is sufficient for people with low vision or who have difficulty proceeding color to read the text. You can find web-based tools to help calculate these ratios. Or TPGi offers a color contrast analyzer that you can download. Lastly, if you take a look at the content being shared, and your first impression is, wow, that's busy, or I don't know what to look at first, then you've probably got a clutter problem. If your eye doesn't know how to follow the flow of information on screen, then people with low vision will have that problem tenfold. Doug Abrams: Just like we mentioned in the previous slide information overload can make it difficult to follow your content. Remember that, and in the end, simpler is better. Moving to slide 12, until now we've only talked about what to do once you've actually gotten an audience in front of you and have started presenting. But let's take a few minutes to talk about what comes before that. Accessible communication starts well before you join the zoom teams or Skype call. It starts when you're preparing your content. Before the day of your presentation, be sure that you make your slides accessible and available. Step one of doing so is testing your slides to make sure they're accessible. One of the best features of PowerPoint is that it comes with a built in accessibility checker. This checks for text alternatives, reading order and more. We'll dig a bit deeper into that in a moment. Doug Abrams: Step two is simply to make your slides available ahead of time. This gives people an opportunity to review the content beforehand, follow along during your presentation, or go back to them after the call has ended. Moving to slide 13, I want to take a moment to talk a little more about the one idea per slide approach I mentioned earlier, and why that can be so important. It has to do with the way the content on the slide is structured, or I should say the lack of structure in PowerPoint slides. One large barrier for screen reader users is the lack of inherent programmatic structure in PowerPoint. Unlike webpages, where we have things like landmark regions and heading levels to convey the structure of content. PowerPoint slides lack any kind of content hierarchy. There's the main slide title, which is announced by some screen readers as a heading level one. But after that, all of the content is announced without any hierarchy. So doing things like breaking a slide into subsections, either visually or with bolded text elements, implicitly heading each section is not easily understood by screen reader users. Because they have to infer the structure based off of the reading order of the content alone. Doug Abrams: So if anyone listening is from Microsoft, please do us all a favor, add semantic, heading styles to PowerPoint like we have in word. Until then, I'll keep pushing the one idea approach. Instead of having one slide with four subsections, just have four slides. You're covering the same amount of information. So the time it takes to present should not significantly change. But it will make it easier for people who rely on assistive technologies to read and understand. Moving to slide 14, we talked earlier about verbalizing alternatives for things like charts and graphics. But we also want to make sure that the same information is available if someone is reading back through the slides later on. With that, there are two ways to provide a text alternative. One is using the built in alt text pain, which you can get to by navigating to the review ribbon in PowerPoint, then expanding the check accessibility, dropdown and selecting alt text. Doug Abrams: Alternatively, you can get to this by right clicking on an image and selecting edit alt text. From here you can enter a text alternative in the alt text pane or mark it as decorative. Again, the Marcus decorative option seems to have inconsistent support at the moment. Another thing I've noticed is that if the text alternative is too long, some screen readers may stop announcing it part way through. One way to work around this is with the second approach off screen text. If you place text outside of the visible area of a slide, it's still in the reading order for screen reader users. We can take advantage of this for when longer text alternatives are required. It's also useful for ensuring all of your slides have a title, even if you don't want the title to be visible when presenting. For those of you who are able to see the presentation, I have an example of one of our previous slides where you can see, I used off screen text for the slide title and some alternatives. Doug Abrams: Some built in features of PowerPoint, such as charts and diagrams, try to help screen readers, announce information, to make it easier to understand the visual. Sometimes it's okay. And sometimes it can backfire and not make much sense. It's a good idea to test this with a screen reader, if you're inserting complex objects into your slide. If you find that it doesn't make sense, how a screen reader announces the object, one workaround is to copy the object and paste it back in as an image. Then you can use one of the methods we talked about to provide a more useful text alternative. Moving to slide 15, for anyone who ever plans to include images in their presentation, i.e everyone, please go make this change to your settings. Doug Abrams: This applies to the whole Microsoft office suite. By default, Microsoft configures PowerPoint to try to automatically generate alt text for you. I have never actually seen this feature provide useful text alternatives. Maybe it has for some others, but it hasn't for me. So I highly recommend disabling it. That way you don't accidentally miss providing alt text somewhere because it had auto-generated text. To do so you can go to file, options, ease of access and uncheck the check box in the automatic alt text section. Moving to slide 16, next to text alternatives, the reading order is probably the next most important, if not the most important aspect of accessible PowerPoint slides. By default, more recently added objects get added to the end of the reading order. Doug Abrams: If content was added out of order from how it's supposed to be read, then screen reader users may have a very difficult time understanding it. Remember before I mentioned screen reader users because of the lack of structure in a PowerPoint slide, have to infer that structure based on the reading order. So you can see if the reading order doesn't make sense, then the structure of your content won't make sense either. Doug Abrams: Moving to slide 17, you can view and correct the reading order of your slides content using the reading order pane, which you can get to by navigating to the review ribbon, then expanding the check accessibility dropdown and selecting reading order pane. Here's a quick example of why an incorrect reading order can be so bad. Spoilers, if anyone hasn't seen Disney's Beauty and the Beast. But a brief synopsis of the story goes, once upon a time Belle's father got lost. Doug Abrams: He was captured by the beast. Belle went to rescue him. Belle and the Beast fell in love. Gaston went to kill the Beast. He fell off the castle and died. They lived happily ever after. However, the order in which this content would be read by a screen reader tells a much different story. Once upon a time Belle and the Beast fell in love. Gaston went to kill the beast. He was captured by the Beast. Belle's father got lost. Belle went to rescue him. He fell off the castle and died. Doug Abrams: They lived happily ever after. I'll pause a second because I'm sure everyone's rolling in their chairs laughing at my extremely funny reading order joke. But as you can tell reading order matters. And can drastically change the way in which people understand your content. Moving to slide 18, digital communication in today's world. I've probably done everyone a disservice up until now if I'm being honest. Doug Abrams: For the most part, I've been putting things in context of using PowerPoint presentation for calls similar to this one. But what's important to remember, especially after the last year and a half that we've all had is that our daily lives have shifted towards digital communication more than ever. Be it for teleworking, online education or even social media. We rely on sending information over a screen. Doug Abrams: And regardless of if you're showing a PowerPoint deck, a PDF, sharing a meme or teaching preschoolers how to hold a pencil properly. The way in which you communicate has a huge impact on the person on the other side of that screen. Moving on to our next to last slide, we're almost at the end of today's presentation, but before we wrap up, here's a quick summary of the dos and don'ts that we've learned. Make sure that you verbally describe any relevant visual information. Don't feel the need to describe decorative content. Pay attention to how your audience chimes in. Doug Abrams: Don't fall victim to information overload and make overly complex slides that rely on a visual structure. Make sure that content you're sharing is as legible as possible. And make sure your content is accessible and send it out prior to the call. And with that, do we have any questions? So I'm going to go through starting with the Q&A panel here. It looks like we do have a couple of things coming in. So Stephanie Nielsen asks screen readers read the decorative image. So it depends on how the image is defined in your content. Doug Abrams: So for example, in PowerPoint by default it will read a shape that you insert into your PowerPoint slide. There is an option, like I mentioned earlier in the alt text pane, where you can market as decorative. But it seems like there's inconsistent support right now if you use that option. Another question from Stephanie, how does one learn how a screen reader works so they can think about how to develop content in a more accessible way? That's a really good question. Doug Abrams: There are materials out there as far as how to use a screen reader. Off hand, I don't remember if TPGi has training modules specific to how to use a screen reader. We can look up after today's call is over to see if we do have any good resources for how to do so. In general, I learn best from hands on doing. So I would recommend for people like that to go ahead and just install a screen reader on your computer. NVDA is a free screen reader for Windows. Apple machines come built in with the voiceover screen reader. Each one has its own nuances, but they all tend to follow a pretty similar approach in terms of how they navigate through content. They have what's called a virtual cursor, which allows you to go through content more linearly and read out everything that's exposed to the screen reader. Doug Abrams: And then they also have built in shortcuts to quickly navigate to certain types of content like headings or lists. We have a question here from an anonymous attendee. Assume your audience is people with cognitive disabilities, and your image is a non decorative image with 400 characters of text, both the image and the text is important. Assume this is a photo of the poet, Walt Whitman, and the on image text is a poem of his. This special slash narrow audience has a cognitive load slash reading capability, slash level of two or three simple sentences. The image includes up to 10 sentences. Doug Abrams: I cannot find a solution to this dilemma, slash conflict in W3C or elsewhere. What do you recommend? That's definitely a challenging one. Again, today we were mainly focusing more on visual disabilities. We were potentially going to have some follow up sessions about other types of disabilities as well, because again, presenting impacts everybody. Honestly for a specific example, this complicated, I'd probably have to think it through for a little bit before giving a useful answer. So apologies, but I'll try and think through that some more. And when we send out follow up information on additional questions, I'll try to include some notes on that as well. Doug Abrams: Another question from an anonymous attendee, irritations to screen reader users also include the playing of loud and intrusive music prior to the meeting an excessive use of the chart during presentations. I'm sure there are more. So it's an excellent point. And brings up another aspect, which is screen reader users are relying a lot on auditory information. So anytime you have anything loud, or anytime you have any overlapping audio, it can make it much more difficult for people who rely exclusively on audio mediums to understand the information. Doug Abrams: That doesn't just apply to music prior to the meeting. It can also apply if you have any videos that include audio included in your presentation. But absolutely a very valuable comment there. Thank you for including that. Okay. We have a question from Kim Alexander, will this information be shared later after this meeting? Mike, keep me honest on this one, but we will be sharing the recording of today's meeting, and the presentation deck was shared in a couple of reminder emails prior to this event. Mike Mooney: Yeah. So the PowerPoint... the slide deck was shared prior to the event. And a few days after the webinar recording has been finalized, we'll share the recording, the slide deck again in additional resources. Someone else requested some of the shared information in the chat. So we'll share all of that information with everyone again a few days after the webinar. Doug Abrams: Awesome. Thanks, Mike. We have another question here from Monica Olson. Can you explain off screen text more? Where is that text being created and saved in the slide? Great question. And yeah, let me clarify on that a little bit. So off screen text is created the same way you would create any text on your slide. So you can do it by just inserting a normal text box in PowerPoint typing out all the information. The only trick to it is you're just adjusting the position of the text box either before or after you've created it, so that it's outside of the visible bounding box of your slide content. We had an anonymous mention in here that some of the questions are in chat. So again I'm going right now through the Q&A panel. So if you can please put your questions in there. If we get through all of the questions in the Q&A panel, I'll try and scrub through the chat and pull out any additional questions we missed. Doug Abrams: But yes, thank you for that reminder. What screen reader do you recommend we can use to test this content? So what I refer to as the big three screen readers right now are JAWS NVDA and voiceover. JAWS and NVDA are both on a windows platform. Voice over is available on apple platforms. NVDA is free to download. JAWS you can download a trial for free but does have a cost associated with it for a full license. And then voiceover is loaded by default onto any Mac operating system. So those are the three that I typically test with not saying that you necessarily have to test with all three whenever you're creating content. But those are the three that I use most often. We have another bit and hear from an anonymous attendee. I just received an email from an accessibility expert stating basically after a long and treacherous history, the long description, long desk attribute does not exist anymore. Doug Abrams: It's not properly supported by assistive technologies. He adds, the practice that you should use today is to provide the description as text on the same page. You can use a details element to hide it by default, like, so, and then gives a code example. So I will mention that this is not really relevant to the topic of today's call. This goes a bit more into the realm of web accessibility, which is its own topic and its own challenge. So I will follow up on the details of this question a little bit later, but I don't want to spend too much time during the actual webinar hour because it's not necessarily what people came here for. Had a question here from Bonnie, what is the best size font to use on a PowerPoint? Is there such a thing as too large? Good question. And in my opinion there's some subjectivity to this, so it's too hard to really give a finite answer. Doug Abrams: Like I mentioned earlier, I think anything between the 18 to 24 range is probably what you want to aim for your bulk of the slide content. I'm sure for some people there is such a thing as too large, but that's probably a little more subjective and it depends on the context of your slide. For example, if the only thing on the slide is just a slide title, then you could probably afford for that to be a little larger than typical. I don't know that. I can't think of any use case off hand where that would cause a problem. We have a question here from Leann Winberry. Do you have any recommendations for screen readers for Chromebooks? That's a good question. I believe Chromebook has a screen reader specifically for it called ChromeVox, V-O-X. I'm not sure offhand what compatibility for the big three I mentioned earlier would be for a Chromebook. Doug Abrams: But you could try investigating ChromeVox to see if that would work well with your presentations. Do you know a question here from Natasha? Do you know if it's possible to make a Google slides document accessible as a PowerPoint? And do you have tutorials? I don't offhand for the purposes of today, I focused mainly on Microsoft PowerPoint as the medium. Obviously there are dozens and dozens of other presentation platforms out there. But I don't have a lot of insight at this time into how good or bad the accessibility of those presentation platforms are. A good mantra to follow would be test to see. Obviously I don't have the answer right now, but you can always try and run through it with a screen reader to see how well it's able to access the content. We have another anonymous question here. JAWS has... It looks like this may be in response to a previous question. JAWS has a training online and used to offer certificates. DQ has a free list of screen reader shortcuts also contact your local vocational rehab center. Doug Abrams: If you're in the US, many localities have trainers who will happily offer free training, and then they provide a link to the freedom scientific website there for some webinars as well. There are a lot of good free resources out there. I'm sure there are other webinars as well that go through an introductory how to, on how to use screen readers. There's also a lot of good cheat sheets that I've seen out there for quickly referencing things like keyboard shortcuts and everything. We have another here from Rajesh. Hi, I have a question. Today when I was reading a slide, I found a strange issue. What was happening is when I read the PowerPoint in editing mode, everything was read properly, but as soon as started the slideshow, some content was read in a different accent of the English language, how to solve this. That's an interesting one. Doug Abrams: I personally have not dealt with localization where the slide content is set using a machine that's maybe defaulted to a different language. Some things I can think of off the bat there should be a way in PowerPoint. I'd have to look up exactly where this is to set the language of the content so that it is announced properly. But I can find more information on where to find that. That's an interesting question because what if the presentation is created on someone who uses multiple languages. Maybe their PowerPoint is set to a certain language, but they authored it in another, and then you're trying to read it. So let me do some more digging on that Rajesh. And I'll try and get that information out to you. It also touches on a really good point in that there are multiple modes that PowerPoint has. Doug Abrams: It has the default editing mode, and then it also has presentation mode. Some initial feedback that I've gotten from the couple of screen reader users that I talked to in preparation for this webinar commented that most of the time when they're just reading a presentation they will be doing so in presentation mode, not in editing mode. So if you are testing how content is read, I would recommend doing it in that mode. So really good to bring that up. Rajesh, thank you. We have a question for Bonnie, so is slide deck the new term for PowerPoints? I like it. That's probably just partially me trying to be more abstract in terms of how I'm referencing it. Obviously PowerPoint is a branded term referring to Microsoft's product. I like using slide deck or presentation deck as a more generic term because it's less specific to a particular product. Doug Abrams: We have another comment here from an anonymous attendee. Yes. I will appreciate your follow up notes suggestions, solution. I'm keenly interested in TPGi accessibility tool. The audience I serve is practically abandoned slash ignored by society. My mission is to communicate with them a difficult task. You're doing a great humanitarian work. I appreciate it. Bless you. Thank you very much. I do appreciate that comment and thank you for everyone in attendance here, really for what you're doing by attending and trying to be more inclusive and reach a broader audience in how you communicate. So thank you everyone. We have another question here from anonymous. If screen reader does not read alt text during slide sharing mode in zoom, can presenter just caption the images so all can see it, if images simple but important to convey. Doug Abrams: So you bring up a good point here that I really want to emphasize. When you're sharing your screen all the communication platform is doing is sharing essentially a screenshot of what your computer screen looks like in that moment. It's not actually transmitting any of the content. So if a screen reader user is completely blind, even if an image is visually captioned, they're still not going to have access to that information. So you do want to make sure that you are verbally describing any of the visuals on screen that are important to what you're trying to convey. Are notes accessible to screen reader users? Yes. Sorry. That was a question from Natosha. Yes. So screen readers are able to navigate to the presentation notes section if you're using Microsoft PowerPoint. Some feedback I got is that if a screen reader user is looking to get any additional details, they might look there to see if the presenter has included details outside of what's in the actual slide itself. Mike Mooney: Hey, Doug. I know we're coming up on the end of time here. So I just wanted to be conscious of that. But I wanted to mention something and maybe you talk a little bit about this that I saw on the chat, and everyone has been pretty aware that there's a lot of good resources being shared in the chat. And so one of the ideas that was shared early on while we were waiting for the live captioner to come on was maybe we should add closed caption, or maybe a screen of in quotes music is playing. To let people that are able to hear that the presentation is live. There isn't an issue going on. But we were in the midst of actually connecting the captioner. I wasn't sure if you could talk to that a little bit. Because I thought it was a pretty good tip. Doug Abrams: Yeah. That's an interesting point. How do you inform everybody if you're still in that waiting position? I know there was some confusion right before we started the presentation proper because we were waiting on some things to get finished up and prep for the webinar. Apologies for that. I have to think on that too. That interesting. How do you have that starting soon message communicated to everyone? Mike Mooney: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Doug Abrams: And it's definitely an interesting concept. Mike Mooney: We added the note that like, we were getting started and prepared but once people start chatting it just scrolls up. So unless you're constantly scrolling on the top, you're not going to see that note. Zoom almost needs like a pin notification or something like that. You know what I mean? Doug Abrams: Yeah. Well, I like the idea of a starting soon as your slide being the first thing that you're presenting before you even get to your title slide. That's an interesting idea. So I may have to do that from now on. I like it. Mike Mooney: Awesome. Well, everyone I'll let you close out, but again we're going to share all the resources after the webinar and appreciate everyone for joining. So I'll let you take us away or take us out. Doug Abrams: Yeah. Just to reiterate what Mike just said, thank you everyone so much for joining. I appreciate everyone's interest and commitment. I know this is a really sought after topic right now. So please give any feedback. If there's any topics related to presenting that we didn't cover that you'd like to hear more about and maybe we can follow up with some additional content in the future. Thanks everyone for joining. Mike Mooney: Awesome. Thanks a lot everyone. Have a great day. Thanks Doug. Doug Abrams: Thanks Mike.