Make Your Presentations Accessible to All updated - share the news
Author(s) and publish date
- By:
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Shawn Henry
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- Published:
Do you remember a time when people around you broke out in laughter,
but you didn't hear the joke?
You could be doing a similar thing to your audience — leaving some
people out. For example, if you say "you can read it on the slide", you're
probably excluding people who can't see the slide.
We've updated How to Make Presentations Accessible to All to help you make presentations, talks, meetings, training, conferences, etc. accessible to all of your potential audience, including people with disabilities and others. It covers planning, preparing slides, considerations during your presentation, providing accessible material, and more. It also mentions additional benefits of inclusive presentations, for example, improving podcasts of presentations for everyone.
We welcome your help telling conference organizers, presenters, trainers, and others about How to Make Presentations Accessible to All. Sample wording that you can use for your own blog posts, newsletter articles, etc. is available in a Promoting Make Presentations Accessible wiki page. (If you post or publish about it, please let us know by sending e-mail to wai-eo-editors@w3.org so we can add it to our list.)
We also welcome comments on how we might improve this resource in future versions. You can comment on this blog post or send e-mail to the publicly archived list wai-eo-editors@w3.org
Thanks! ~Shawn for WAI's Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG)
For deaf people a sign language interpreter is best since reading comprehension varies. Second best choice would be captions. If neither of those two options are offered deaf people have no way to follow the presentation even if slides are provided.
@Astrid - Thanks for the comment. It's helpful to get additional perspectives.
The document currently says:
"Ask speakers and participants if they have accessibility requirements."
"Arrange for ALDs/hearing loops, interpreters, and/or CART writers, as needed."
The Terminology section explains 'interpreters' as: "This includes sign language interpreters, cued speech transliterators, and others." and 'CART' as: "CART, Computer Aided Real–Time Captioning or Communication Access Realtime Translation, is when a professional types what is being said verbatim so that people can read the text output."
Hopefully that is clear enough to get individual needs met, including those who prefer sign language interpretation and those who prefer CART.
We welcome any other suggestions.
Other suggestion for the Deaf is making sure all DVD and video products are CC (closed captioned). As well as on line videos. Good luck.
George Martin
Deaf Advocate