Presentation Accessibility Guidelines

Presentation Accessibility Action Items

Accessibility action item #1:

Submit your slides to current Program Committee chairs at least 24 hours before your presentation (the earlier the better) When live captioning is provided during the three days of the general conference. Attendees, both local and remote, will be able to view a real-time text transcription of the conference talks.

In order to improve the quality of this service, we ask presenters to send their slides to us so that the captioners can use them as reference and improve the quality of the live text stream. Your slides will empower captioners to prepare for proper nouns, technical jargon, unusual spellings, etc. Note: you can change your slides after submission; you do not need to resubmit any changes unless you feel you added any difficult words or terms that would be challenging for live captioning.

Accessibility action item #2: Design a visually accessible presentation

Fonts:

Avoid fonts with a thin stroke, and choose readable sans serif or serif fonts
Use underlining, italics, and boldface sparingly
Aim for 20-30-point fonts; don’t go below 18-point for slide content (if you plan to share your slides with the community, it’s okay to use smaller fonts for references and URIs)
Good font examples: Helvetica and its clones (Arial, Calibri, etc.).
Other good fonts are Gill Sans, Comic Sans (seriously!), Verdana, Franklin Gothic, Rockwell, Tahoma, Lucida, Times New Roman.

Colors:

Choose text and background colors that have good contrast (the web accessibility threshold isn’t relevant, but the higher the contrast the better): http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

For color blindness considerations, add patterns or labels in graphs and charts, especially if you want to use red and green or yellow and blue

Animations:

Avoid blinking text and animations that endlessly repeat.

If your presentation features lots of animations, videos, etc., put a warning at the start of your talk, especially if any of them have lots of flicker

Accessibility action item #3: If you plan to share your slides with the community, make your slide files accessible

Include speaker notes if the file format allows, and in particular, describe any images, tables, charts, etc.

Specific advice for different presentation tools and formats:

PDF advice (PDF/A is best): http://webaim.org/techniques/acrobat/
PowerPoint and KeyNote accessibility advice: http://webaim.org/techniques/powerpoint/, http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/accessibility/Accessible%20Presentations.pdf

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to: The current Program Committee or Accessibility Committee