An accessible presentation is one that people can read, follow and navigate whether they are sitting at the back of a meeting room, reading your deck on a phone, using a screen reader, or seeing colours differently. In practice, most of the work comes down to ten checks: readable text, strong contrast, meaning that doesn't rely on colour alone, a unique title on every slide, a sensible reading order, alt text for visuals, descriptive links, simple tables, captions for video, and a final run of PowerPoint's built-in Accessibility Checker.
Most of these checks use PowerPoint's built-in tools, and many also make the slides clearer for every viewer.
Why accessibility matters for an ordinary business deck
Your deck rarely stays in the room where you present it. It gets emailed to a decision-maker who wasn't at the meeting, opened on a laptop in a bright office, forwarded to procurement, or read with assistive technology. A slide that only works when you are standing beside it explaining it is a slide that will be misread later.
Accessibility guidance gives you a concrete standard to check against, instead of relying on whether a slide "looks fine" on your own screen.
The 10-point checklist
1. Use text that is large enough and easy to read
Microsoft's accessibility guidance for PowerPoint recommends a font size of 18pt or larger, sans serif fonts such as Arial or Calibri, enough white space, and avoiding all capitals (Microsoft Support: Make your PowerPoint presentations accessible).
Treat 18pt as a floor, not a target. If you find yourself shrinking text below it to fit a slide, that is usually a sign the slide is carrying too much, and some of the content belongs in speaker notes or a separate handout.
2. Check colour contrast, not just colour choice
Low contrast is one of the most common problems in branded decks: light grey text on white, or white text on a pale brand colour.
The web accessibility standard WCAG 2.2 sets a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text, where large text means at least 18pt, or 14pt bold (W3C: Understanding Success Criterion 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum)). WCAG was written for web content, but it is a useful, measurable benchmark for slides too. Microsoft's guidance asks for strong contrast and recommends the Accessibility Checker, but it does not detect every contrast issue (Microsoft Support).
Practical tip: contrast that passes on a monitor can look weaker on a projector or a TV in a bright room. If your slides will be projected, err towards more contrast, not less.
3. Don't rely on colour alone to carry meaning
"Red means behind schedule, green means on track" only works if everyone can tell red from green. Add a second signal: a label, an icon, a pattern, bold text or a position on the slide.
Microsoft suggests checking your slides in greyscale. On Windows 11, you can turn on a greyscale colour filter under Start > Settings > Accessibility > Color filters (Microsoft Support). If a chart stops making sense in greyscale, it needs labels.
4. Give every slide a unique, descriptive title
Screen reader users often move through a deck by slide title, the way sighted readers skim headings. Microsoft recommends a unique title on every slide, and notes you can position a title off the visible slide if you don't want it shown (Microsoft Support).
"Results" repeated on five slides doesn't help anyone. "Q3 enquiries rose after the new booking page" tells the reader what the slide is for. As a bonus, descriptive titles make it much easier for any reader to follow the argument.
5. Set a logical reading order
Screen readers follow the slide's reading order, which may differ from its visual layout. On a slide built up over several edits, a caption might be read before its heading. Use PowerPoint's Reading Order pane to put the title first and the rest in a sensible sequence (Microsoft Support).
6. Write useful alt text for images, charts and icons
Alt text should state what a visual is there to communicate, in a sentence or two. Microsoft advises not starting with "An image of…", always checking auto-generated alt text, and not using text inside an image as the only way to convey important information (Microsoft Support).
Hypothetical example (for illustration only):
- Weak: "Bar chart."
- Better: "Bar chart showing monthly enquiries for [Business name], rising from about 40 in January to about 90 in June."
Purely decorative shapes and background graphics don't need a description; PowerPoint lets you mark them as decorative so screen readers skip them (Microsoft Support).
7. Make links say where they go
"Click here" and "Learn more" are meaningless when a screen reader lists all the links on a slide, and unhelpful in a printed or PDF copy. Microsoft recommends using descriptive link text, such as the destination page's title (Microsoft Support).
8. Keep tables simple, or avoid them
Microsoft's guidance is to avoid tables where you can. If you need one, keep the structure simple, with no merged or split cells and no tables inside tables, and turn on Header Row on the Table Design tab so screen readers can identify column headings (Microsoft Support).
A dense 8-column pricing table is often better as a short summary on the slide, with the full table in an appendix or attachment.
9. Add captions to video
If your deck includes video with speech, add closed captions or subtitles. Supported Windows and Mac versions can import separate caption files; Microsoft documents WebVTT support on Mac from version 16.63 (Microsoft Support). Captions also help anyone watching in a noisy café or with the sound off.
10. Run the Accessibility Checker before you send
In PowerPoint, go to Review > Check Accessibility. The Accessibility pane lists issues such as missing alt text, missing slide titles and low-contrast text, and explains how to fix each one (Microsoft Support).
What the Accessibility Checker won't catch
The checker is a good first pass, but it can't judge meaning. It won't tell you that:
- your alt text describes a chart but misses its point
- a slide title is technically unique but vague
- a slide is so crowded that nobody could take it in during a two-minute talk
- your spoken presentation relies on pointing ("as you can see here…") without saying what "here" shows
For those, read through the deck once as if you were seeing it for the first time, ideally with the sound of your own voice switched off.
A quick workflow for an existing deck
If you're fixing a deck you already have, this order avoids redoing work:
- Fix the template first. Adjust text sizes and colours in the slide master, then check the existing slides: changed layouts may need to be reapplied, and manually formatted text may need separate fixes.
- Add or rewrite slide titles.
- Add alt text to every meaningful image and chart; mark decoration as decorative.
- Check reading order on any slide with several text boxes or images.
- Simplify tables and add labels to colour-coded charts.
- Run the Accessibility Checker and clear what it finds.
- Test in greyscale and, if you can, on the screen or projector you'll actually use.
If you want a template built for this from the start, Microsoft also offers accessible templates: go to File > New and search for "accessible templates" (Microsoft Support).
Limitations worth knowing
- This checklist is a practical starting point, not a compliance audit. If you have a legal or contractual accessibility requirement, for example in a public-sector tender, check the specific standard the buyer expects.
- PowerPoint menus vary by version. The paths above follow Microsoft's current guidance for PowerPoint on Windows; Mac and web versions may differ slightly.
- Exported PDFs need their own check. Accessibility features in your PowerPoint file don't automatically carry over perfectly to every export, so if you share a PDF, check it too.