Welcome to the nineteenth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
Listen to the nineteenth episode of the Access On podcast (Browser).
Or listen on your preferred podcast platform.
Timestamps
The show is segmented by chapter, making it easy to move between segments of the podcast if you have an app or player that supports chapters. Below is what's on the show this week, and when you can hear it.
- Join us for our extended seminar on online meeting platforms 0:00
- Creating PowerPoint presentations as a blind person 1:50
- Tech tip, the iOS ItemChooser 56:16
- Closing and contact info 58:17
Transcript
Speaker 1: Live the life you want.
Jonathan Mosen: I'm Jonathan Mosen. This is Access on the Technology Podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. This week we look ahead to the next CENA presentation on working with today's online meeting platforms. We bring you an abridged version of our presentation on creating PowerPoint presentations with a screen reader. We'll cover the things that make a visually attractive presentation and walk through creating a sample presentation. And our tech tip covers an often forgotten powerful feature in voiceover for iOS.
Good to be bringing you another episode from the Jernigan Institute, the headquarters of the National Federation of the Blind. Before we go on to our main feature today, which is an abridged version of our presentation on making PowerPoint as a blind person I do want to tell you about another CENA event that is coming up on April 16. And this is an extended presentation on online meeting platforms. These days, almost every business uses online meeting platforms daily.
Platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams have gone through many stages of accessibility. So come learn about the updates and new features that this software offers. We're going to be covering Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, the accessibility of each platform, changes and software updates. You can register for the online meetings platform seminar by going to nfb.org/cena. That's nfb.org slash C-E-N-A. And make sure you choose the link for our events and training. You will find the register link there. We look forward to having you there on April 16.
Now let's move on to our feature presentation today, which is an abridged version of our CENA presentation on creating PowerPoint's presentations as a blind person. I'm using JAWS using this presentation, which is used by most blind people in a professional setting. But unless I point out that a command is specific to JAWS the tips and the techniques that I'm describing will be useful to you if you are using any Windows screen reader such as Narrator or NVDA.
Microsoft PowerPoint is a popular application for creating slide based presentations. It's part of the Microsoft Office 365 suite. And it's widely used by students, teachers, and professionals to share information with an audience. You can use PowerPoint in all walks of life. It's being used in school projects, business meetings, conferences, training sessions, and even personal events like weddings or community talks.
I have to say even geek that I am I've never done a PowerPoint at a wedding, but I've heard that it is done. A PowerPoint presentation consists of individual pages called slides. Each slide can contain text, bullet points, images, charts, video, audio, and more. During a presentation the presenter usually speaks to explain the content on each slide. PowerPoint helps structure that talk by visually organizing the key points on screen.
Now, you might be thinking, "Hm, PowerPoint's such a visual sounding thing. Can I really use it as a blind person?" And I'm here to say emphatically, "Absolutely you can." PowerPoint like most Microsoft office apps has lots of accessibility features. And you can create and read slides using a screen reader and present with a screen reader. If you use Braille and you have access to a Braille display you are at an advantage here and I'll discuss that later. Even if you don't ever see yourself running your own PowerPoint presentations others may send you PowerPoint presentations. So knowing how to interact with PowerPoint is a useful skill for obtaining information.
Let's talk first about what makes a good PowerPoint presentation, because this is something that I get asked a lot about when blind people talk to me about PowerPoint that they know how to do it in a technical sense, but want more information about what makes something look visually acceptable. Creating a presentation isn't that difficult, but many people have concerns about just making sure that there's no overlapping content, structure, that kind of thing. And I would say at this time that there is no harm in using visual interpretation like Aira to verify the visual aesthetics of your presentation should you feel comfortable doing that. I always do this myself in fact just to give me additional peace of mind. There are some universal design principles and best practices that'll help your presentation shine. Your screen reader can help you achieve all of these elements.
First, keep slides clear and concise with bullet points. The most common mistake that people make with PowerPoint is packing way too much text onto a slide. Readers can't absorb a long paragraph of text on the screen while they're listening to you speak. So use bullet points, short phrases to capture the key ideas. Think of each bullet point as a prompt for what you'll talk about. For example, if you are presenting about the Beatles, and I will be doing exactly this a little bit later you'll be delighted to hear, a bullet might say, "John meets Paul 1957." Rather than a full sentence describing that event. This keeps the slides concise and it lets the audience listen to your narration for the details. They help you focus on core ideas.
When using a screen reader, you can navigate bullets by moving up and down arrow through the slide. And we'll show you that when we make a PowerPoint presentation. In PowerPoint, when you're typing into a text placeholder you can create a bullet by simply typing the asterisk key and then a space and then the text will automatically turn into a bulleted list. You can also press Enter to add a new bullet or press tab to indent a bullet which will make it a sub bullet if you will of the original point. Using these simple lists will make both your life and your audience's life easier.
Now, opinions vary about how many bullet points you should pack onto a slide, but the consensus seems to be that you should try to have no more than six bullet points on a single slide. Another hallmark of a good slide is readable text. And this means choosing an appropriate font type and size. A Sans Serif font like Arial or Calibri is typically easiest to read. You should avoid fancy or cursive fonts that may be hard to decipher. Also, make the text large enough for your audience to see clearly. As a rule of thumb use at least 18 point font or larger for slide body text. In many cases, 24 point or even 28 point is better for the main text on a slide, especially in a large room.
Titles can be even bigger. They can be 32 to 45 point if you like. Many accessibility guidelines actually require a minimum of 24 point for PowerPoint text to ensure readability. So don't be shy about using a big font. Your audience and any low vision viewers will thank you for that. In PowerPoint you can adjust font size using keyboard shortcuts or on the ribbon. So if you're in a text box. You could press Ctrl Shift with the greater than key and that will increase the font size. And Ctrl Shift and the less than key will decrease the font size. Some screen readers automatically speak the new font size, but some do not in which case you'll have to use your screen readers command to query the point size to check what's going on.
You should also avoid using all caps or excessive italics and underlines in your slide. All caps text is harder to read. Italics and underlines can reduce clarity. So instead you can use bold if you want to emphasize something or a large font size to make something stand out. Go for high contrast and simple design. If your slide text is say yellow on white, then nobody's going to be able to read that.
Low contrast between text and background is a common problem with PowerPoint presentations. You should aim for a high contrast color scheme, typically dark text on a light background or vice versa. For example, black or navy text on a white slide is quite readable. PowerPoint themes usually handle this for you, but if you change colors be mindful of contrast.
It's also wise to keep your slide design simple. You should avoid busy backgrounds or cluttered layouts. While PowerPoint offers complex templates with graphics, as a blind presenter you might prefer using a clean template like the default theme that has solid contrast and straightforward layout. And this ensures that you can easily navigate placeholders and your audience sees a clear slide. If you're presenting on behalf of an organization you should check if they have a PowerPoint template that they've created, which might include the organization's logo and preferred branding. And don't be shy about pointing out if there are accessibility issues with that custom template. Sometimes this can happen.
And whoever created the template should ensure that you as a blind employee can work comfortably with it. And just a word of caution it is very common for these templates to contain placeholder text. Text that guides you about the kind of content that should be at a given field. So be mindful of this and ensure that you've deleted all that placeholder example text before you consider your presentation ready for prime time.
Likewise, use animations and transitions sparingly. Animations are visual effects where text or images fly in or bounce. And they can be a lot of fun, but too many can distract your audience or even cause issues for people who are prone to motion sensitivity. As a general rule only add an animation if it serves a purpose, not just for decoration. For instance animating bullet points to appear one at a time can help the audience focus on each point as you speak. That's a useful animation. But sort of spinning text or endless GIFs on a slide, not so much. We'll see later how you can add a simple transition effect between slides, but we'll keep it subtle when we do that.
Leverage speaker notes. We're going to be talking a lot about speaker notes in this webinar. Speaker notes are like your private cheat sheet for each slide. They're not visible to the audience on the projector, but you the presenter have them on your screen and can read them with your screen reader. A good PowerPoint presentation often uses minimal text on the slide and puts a lot of supporting detail in the speaker notes. This is perfect for blind presenters. You can write out reminders, facts or even the full script if you prefer to do that in the notes area and refer to it while you're presenting without cluttering the main slide.
Think of speaker notes as the place for everything you want to say, but don't need the audience to read. For example, on a slide with the bullet, "John meets Paul 1957." Your speaker note could have a short story about how John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met at a church event in Liverpool in July of 1957. During the slideshow you can have your screen reader read the notes to you through an earbud or a Braille display, which is super convenient if you are a Braille user. So you can relay that story to the audience in a natural way.
When creating your presentation it's a great practice to add notes to any slide where you have more to say than what's on the slide. You can add a note in PowerPoint by selecting the slide and then pressing F6 until you reach the notes pane. And we will show you that as we build our PowerPoint presentation. It is really that easy. Notes can be as long as you need. Your audience will never see them, but you'll have them at your fingertips or under your fingertips if you're reading via Braille. And if you intend distributing the PowerPoint presentation to your audience those with a real interest in your topic will be able to read the speaker notes and do a deep dive into your subject.
Visuals in media can greatly enhance a PowerPoint presentation. Just because we can't see the image it doesn't mean that we should avoid using images. Many blind presenters include photos or graphics to make their slides more engaging for sighted viewers. The key is to handle multimedia thoughtfully and accessibly. Use relevant images to support your message. For example, a photo of the Beatles in 1960 in our example topic. I do hope it goes without saying, but please be the change you want to see in the world and always, always add alt text to describe each image. Alt text is a written description that screen readers will speak.
In PowerPoint you can add alt text by selecting the image pressing Shift with F10 or the application key if you're lucky enough to still have one and open the context menu and then you choose edit alt text. We'll show you that as well. And there you can type a description like, "Photo of the Beatles performing in Hamburg in early 1960." And in this way you can have additional information about the photo and so can blind people who might be reading your PowerPoint presentation later.
If an image is purely decorative, you can mark it as decorative so screen readers skip it entirely. You might consider adding an audio clip to your slide. For instance, a short snippet of a Beatles song or a voice recording. Audio can be a powerful addition, but make sure that it's used purposefully and of that you have the right to use it. For example, a ten second music clip could set the mood. Similar to audio you can embed videos. And if you do include a video and it doesn't contain audio description be ready to describe it or at least summarize the key points for anyone in your audience who might also be blind. You can use one of the many AI services that describe photos to give you a description so you can fully understand the photo that you're including and that allows you to speak to it with confidence. As the presenter, you are the bridge between the visuals and those who can't see the visuals.
Now I'm about to put all this into practice and we're going to build an example PowerPoint presentation. And our example topic is the formation of the Beatles. And this will be a simple sick slide deck telling the story of how the Beatles came together. I'm in PowerPoint now, but what you would do is first open the PowerPoint app. You can press the Windows key and type PowerPoint and press Enter. And depending on how PowerPoint is configured, PowerPoint may open in the start screen, which was formerly called the Backstage View. I like to disable this so I get straight to a blank presentation when I open PowerPoint. That's just a matter of personal preference.
And if you want to do this can press Alt F and then up arrow is the quickest way to get to options. You press Enter to open the PowerPoint options dialog box. In the PowerPoint options dialog box you go to the general section. And under the startup options category you find the checkbox labeled, "Show the start screen when this application starts." And you want to uncheck this box to disable the start screen. And you press Enter to choose the okay button, which will save the setting and close the dialog box.
If you are already in PowerPoint and your settings haven't already taken you to a blank presentation you can press Ctrl N, which is a standard Windows convention to create a new presentation. Within a second or two you will have a new blank presentation. And you're now in the normal view on the first slide, which is a title slide by default. In PowerPoint normal view is the main editing view with the slide workspace in the center. And then you've got a thumbnail list of slides on the left hand side. This title slide is one that you'd put on display when you start giving your presentation. For example, it may be on the screen as people walk into the event or when you are giving brief introductory remarks before getting on with the presentation.
On the title slide there are usually just two text placeholders. One for the title and one for the subtitle. Your screen reader might automatically put you in the title placeholder. If not you can press tab and make sure that focus is set correctly. So now we are ready to Enter the title of our PowerPoint presentation.
JAWS: Center title placeholder. Center title placeholder.
Jonathan Mosen: I'm in center title, placeholder. I'm going to press Enter.
JAWS: Enter. Edit.
Jonathan Mosen: And I'm going to type the-
JAWS: Formation of the-
Jonathan Mosen: The formation of the Beatles. I'm going to press Ctrl Enter.
JAWS: Ctrl Enter. Edit.
Jonathan Mosen: And that moves to the next placeholder. This handy shortcut is telling PowerPoint, "Okay, I'm done with entering my title. Move to the next one." On a title slide you can jump between the title and the subtitle box. So we're going to type in the subtitle-
JAWS: Webinar demo by the National Federation of The Blind.
Jonathan Mosen: It's not absolutely necessary to have a subtitle placeholder if you don't want to, but it's kind of a nice touch. Now we are going to add a speaker note for this slide. Maybe a note to introduce the topic. To do this I'm going to press F6. And this moves us around various fields in the PowerPoint application.
JAWS: F6 view indicator slide 1 of 1. 1 of 13. Slide number.
Jonathan Mosen: I'll press F6 again.
JAWS: F6. Upper ribbon expanded. Ribbon. Home tab 2 of 13.
Jonathan Mosen: Where on the ribbon.
JAWS: F6. Leaving menus. The formation of the Beatles. Slide 1 of 1. Edit.
Jonathan Mosen: Now JAWS is not actually telling me that I'm in the speaker notes field, which is a little unfortunate. But I know that I am because I know my way around PowerPoint. And I can also verify that because if I Shift tab I'm not able to move out of this speaker notes field. So that's where we are. What I have done for speeding this demonstration up and making it a little easier for you is I use Leasey with JAWS, which is a third party add-on.
And I have saved all of the speaker notes that I'm going to use today as what are called Leasey texts. Which just makes it easy for me to paste them into my speaker notes without having to type them. But in the normal course of events you would just type into this field. So I'm going to use my speaker notes for slide one.
JAWS: Leaving ribbon. Slide one. Center the formation of the Beatles slide.
Jonathan Mosen: Now I'm going to go to the top of the speaker notes field. It's just like a little edit field like you were in a Word document or notepad.
JAWS: Ctrl. Top. Edit. This is the demo presentation I gave to the boutique on creating a PowerPoint presentation as a blind person.
Jonathan Mosen: And that's what I have in that speaker notes field. Now I'm going to press F6 to go back to the main slide.
JAWS: F6. Slides thumbnails tab. The formation of the Beatles, slide 1 of 1. The formation of the Beatles.
Jonathan Mosen: F6 again.
JAWS: F6. Slide area.
Jonathan Mosen: And we're back in the slide area where we can continue to work here. So you might need to press that twice. And now the focus is returned to the title and the subtitle. And your first slide is done. So it has a title, a subtitle, and even a little speaker note for your reference. Before moving on I want to give our presentation a quick save. As we all know saving regularly is a good idea, so I'm going to press Ctrl S.
JAWS: Ctrl S. Save as dialogue. File name. Edit combo. The formation of the Beatles.pptx.
Jonathan Mosen: And actually that's fine. It's got that from my title slide. The Formation of the Beatles. And I'm happy with that. So I'm just going to press Enter.
JAWS: Enter. The formation of the Beatles slide has notes, 1 of 1.
Jonathan Mosen: Now, depending on how you have your Office 365 set up and logged in you might be saving this to OneDrive by default, which is totally fine. You can also choose a location with keyboard navigation in the screen dialogue, but we're just going to keep it simple and accept the default. Now we're going to create our second slide. And it will cover the early formation of the band, John Lennon meets Paul McCartney, et cetera. Let's also demonstrate how to create bullet points on the slide. I'm going to press Ctrl M for mic to insert a new slide.
JAWS: Slide two.
Jonathan Mosen: This keyboard shortcut typically adds a slide with the same layout as the previous slide by default, but it's smart enough to know that you won't want a second title slide so it defaults to a simple slide with a field for the title and then a field for your contents. In this case bullet points.
JAWS: Title place holder.
Jonathan Mosen: I tabbed to the title placeholder. I'll press Enter.
JAWS: Enter. Edit.
Jonathan Mosen: And now I'll type the title,
JAWS: Edit. Early days John and-
Jonathan Mosen: "Early days John and Paul." I'll just press the space so you get to hear that echo. And this will be a summary of what the slide is about so people can just glance at that title and get a feel for what's coming. Now. Once again, I'm going to press Ctrl Enter to move to the body contents placeholder.
JAWS: Ctrl Enter. Edit.
Jonathan Mosen: And now we're ready to enter our bullet points. PowerPoint likely already set this text box to a bulleted list style. And some screen readers will tell you this, some will not. If by chance you don't get bullets when you start to review this slide you can press either the asterisk key at the beginning or Ctrl Shift L, which is a Microsoft office bulleted list keyboard shortcut to kick the bullet points into gear on the current paragraph. So we're going to add a couple of bullet points about John and Paul.
JAWS: 19577.
Jonathan Mosen: Oops, backspace.
JAWS: John Lennon meets Paul. Bullet, 1957 John Lennon meets Paul McCartney.
Jonathan Mosen: I'll press Enter.
JAWS: Enter.
Jonathan Mosen: And you heard bullet there. So we are creating a bulleted list. Now I'm going to enter a second bullet point.
JAWS: They performed together as The Quarrymen.
Jonathan Mosen: And we'll press Enter.
JAWS: Enter.
Jonathan Mosen: Now we have two bullets. Notice how I'm keeping each point brief. If you have more to say then that's what the speaker notes are for. And we might add more bullet points, but for this slide let's keep it simple for now at two. We're going to get more ambitious as we go along. So suppose we want a sub bullet, a bullet indented under another one. For example, under the first bullet we might want to note the exact date or the place where John and Paul met. And to create a sub bullet, or an indent if you like, you just press the tab key at the start of a bullet line. So let's try it on the second bullet point. We'll go to the start of they performed together.
JAWS: Bullet, they performed home.
Jonathan Mosen: So I did that and now I'll press tab. And we heard that it'll click and now that bullet point is indented. And you'll be able to hear that really clearly actually when we run the slide show. If you need to out dent back to a higher level just reverse this. Press Shift tab. When you do that at the start of the line, that will out into the bullet point again. The more text you add the lower the point size of the text will go. So all the text can fit on the slide.
As you keep adding bullet points it really is a good idea to check regularly to make sure that the point size isn't getting too small. Again, 24 point is ideal. 18 pointers perhaps in some views marginal, but it's definitely the lowest point size that you would want to get away with. We can query that every screen reader will let you do that. It's the JAWS key with F in my case,
JAWS: Aligned left. Paragraph level two. Black on default. Aptos 24 point.
Jonathan Mosen: We heard a lot of things there. We're at 24 point and we also heard that we're at paragraph level two. And that confirms to us that the indentation that I attempted did in fact work. Now we're going to add a speaker note for slide two. And to do this we're going to press F6 until we get to the speaker notes.
JAWS: F6, view indicators. F6 upper ribbon expanded. F6 leaving menus. Early days John and Paul slide 2 of 2. Edit.
Jonathan Mosen: And we hear the magic word, "Edit." Which means I'm in the speaker note. I'm going to just do my magic insertion trick rather than typing them.
JAWS: Leaving. Slide one. List one, list view. Slide two 18. Enter. Early days John-
Jonathan Mosen: Now we have speaker notes as if we had typed them in at the top of the file and just read them.
JAWS: John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met at St. Peter's church Fete in Walton on July 6th, 1957. John's band of Quarrymen was playing. A mutual friend introduced Paul.
Jonathan Mosen: That's extra detail that you'd want to say, but it's too much text for the slide itself. Let's just get out of the speaker notes. I'll press F6.
JAWS: F6, slide thumbnails tab. Early days. F6, slide area.
Jonathan Mosen: Now we're back in the slide area. We are going to create a new slide and practice using a different method just to give you exposure to another way of doing this. And that is using the ribbon to insert a slide. I'm going to press Alt H to go to the home tab and then I'm going to press I for, "Insert slide." So we'll do that.
JAWS: Upper ribbon expanded. Title slide button 1 of 9.
Jonathan Mosen: Now we have the slide gallery and we can write arrow to move through the different layout options. Let's see what's here.
JAWS: I. Title and content button. 2 of 9. Section header button. 3 of 9. Two content button. 4 of 9. Comparison button 5 of 9. Title only button. Blank button, 7 of 9. Content with caption button 8 of 9. Picture with caption button 9 of 9.
Jonathan Mosen: So a few layout choices there, but I'm just going to go back.
JAWS: Section header button. Title and content button 2 of 9.
Jonathan Mosen: We're just going to stick with a good old title and content. So I will press Enter to select it.
JAWS: Enter slide 3. 3 of 3.
Jonathan Mosen: Ctrl M is a lot quicker but you can choose other layout should you need to and you may want to do that, especially when we start getting onto more complex things shortly. Let's just make sure that we are in the title placeholder.
JAWS: Enter. Edit.
Jonathan Mosen: And there we are. I pressed Enter to do that and we're going to title this, "George joins the band."
JAWS: Edit. George joins the... Blank. Edit. George joins the band.
Jonathan Mosen: And we'll press Ctrl Enter.
JAWS: Ctrl Enter. Edit.
Jonathan Mosen: And that will take us to the next field. We're going to add a couple of bullet points.
JAWS: 1958, George Harrison joins John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Enter.
Jonathan Mosen: We press Enter, so we can go onto the next bullet point. And we'll type this interesting little fact actually.
JAWS: Lead guitarist at age 15. Enter.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah, he was just 15 when he joined. And he became the lead guitarist, which is quite extraordinary. Well, let's be ambitious and add a third bullet point.
JAWS: Now a trio called Johnny and the Moondogs. Enter.
Jonathan Mosen: And Johnny and the Moondogs, which they performed under for quite some time actually. All right, now you can press Enter here. That will create an empty bullet point. That doesn't really matter, because empty bullet points don't show the slideshow algorithm takes care of that. So slide three has a title and a few bullets. Now we're going to add a speaker note again, so press F6.
JAWS: F6, view indicator slide 3 of 3. F6, upper ribbon expanded. Ribbon F6, leaving menus. George joins the band slide 3 of 3.
Jonathan Mosen: F6 three times at the moment, but that will change soon I think. Now I'm going to add my speaker notes for slide three,
JAWS: Leaving... Slide one... List... Slide three. Enter. George joins the band.
Jonathan Mosen: And let's just review what's here.
JAWS: George Harrison was invited by Paul to watch the band. After proving his guitar skills playing raunchy on a bus, he joined as lead guitarist in 1958.
Jonathan Mosen: Now let's get back to the slide by pressing F6 twice.
JAWS: F6, slide... F6, slide-
Jonathan Mosen: Now we are going to create a fourth slide. And this is where we're going to get a little bit more ambitious. Slide four will be about the early years around 1960 to 1962 before Ringo joins the band. And we are going to add some stuff here. So let's press Ctrl M.
JAWS: Slide four.
Jonathan Mosen: Press tab.
JAWS: Title place holder. Enter. Edit.
Jonathan Mosen: We'll do the Beatles in Germany and Ctrl Enter.
JAWS: Ctrl Enter. Edit.
Jonathan Mosen: And we're going to add first of all before we get to multimedia a couple of bullet points.
JAWS: Performances in Hamburg clubs 1960, 1962. Enter.
Jonathan Mosen: That's the first bullet point.
JAWS: Stuart Supliff on bass. Pete Best on drums. Enter.
Jonathan Mosen: And press enter. And then a third bullet point.
JAWS: Brian Epstein becomes manager in 1961. Enter.
Jonathan Mosen: Press enter. Let's say that we have saved an image of the Beatles in Hamburg and we want to add it to our slide to make it visually interesting. How do we add it to our PowerPoint? To do that we are going to press Alt N to open the insert ribbon,
JAWS: Upper ribbon expanded. Ribbon, insert tab 3 of 13.
Jonathan Mosen: Now we're going to press P for picture. And we don't get any feedback, but then we press the number one.
JAWS: Insert picture from group. This device dot, dot, dot. 1 of 4. Insert pictures from your computer or from other computers that you're connected to.
Jonathan Mosen: And we do want to insert from this device. So I'm going to press Enter.
JAWS: Upper ribbon expanded. Leaving menus. Leaving ribbons. Insert picture dialogue.
Jonathan Mosen: I'm going to navigate to where I know picture is. This is just a standard Windows file open dialog.
JAWS: Explore navigation pane. Review and shell folder, camera, navigate, documents, enter. NFB. Enter access on CENA webinars. Enter PowerPoint.
Jonathan Mosen: And now.
JAWS: The Beatles in hamburg.web 1 of 1.
Jonathan Mosen: Here is magically the Beatles in Hamburg. And I'm going to press Enter. And that just inserts the photo into the PowerPoint presentation.
JAWS: The Beatles in Germany slide 4 of 4. Picture. Picture overlaps.
Jonathan Mosen: Now we hear that the picture is there. So I'm going to bring up the context menu.
JAWS: Group. Cut. 1 of 3.
Jonathan Mosen: And press A.
JAWS: View. Leaving menus. Menu. A group of men playing guitars AI generated content may be incorrect, dot, dot. Use approve or edit button to give feedback to the alternate text. Use key combination Shift, plus F10 followed by A to access the alt text pane graphic. Ribbon expanded press F6 to access.
Jonathan Mosen: What we have there is some alt text that was inserted by AI. And you will see this increasingly now, but what I'm going to do is delete that by pressing Ctrl A and Delete. And I'm just going to type "John..." Let's just make this space quick. The Beatles performing in Hamburg with Pete Best on drums. All we have to do now is to press Escape to get out of the alt text insertion. It will keep it there.
JAWS: Escape. The Beatles in Germany. Slide 4 of 4. Picture. The Beatles-
Jonathan Mosen: And so now we have the image inserted and we have the alt text as well. Let's have a look at inserting an audio clip as well. Let's get really ambitious. And we're going to do this by pressing Alt N.
JAWS: Alt N. Picture. The Beatles performing in Hamburg with Pete Best on drums. Picture overlay... Group. Audio on my PC, dot, dot, dot.
Jonathan Mosen: When the audio is indeed on my PC. So we'll just press P.
JAWS: File. Leaving menus. Insert audio dialogue. File. Insert. Paul clip.one. 1 of 1 Paul Clip.
Jonathan Mosen: And it did remember this time the location. And I have a very short Paul McCartney clip talking about the Beatles time in Hamburg. We'll press Enter on that.
JAWS: Enter. The Beatles in Germany slide 4 of 4.
Jonathan Mosen: And we have inserted the audio and we'll let you hear how that plays a little bit later. So now our slide four has got much more ambitious. It has bullets, it has an image and it has audio. Now we're going to add a note for ourselves, because we haven't done that yet. And you'll notice that things are a bit different.
JAWS: F6, description edit. F6, view indicators. Slide... F6, Upper ribbon. Audio tool. F6, leaving menus. The Beatles in Germany's slide 4 of 4. Edit.
Jonathan Mosen: So what's different is that the alt text pane has stayed open should we add images in the future. You can go ahead and close it, but I'm just going to leave it for now. And now we're going to insert our speaker notes for slide four.
JAWS: Slide five. List one. List view. Slide. List one. List view. Slide four. Enter.
Jonathan Mosen: And let's just have a look at what's in the speaker notes now that we would've typed in under normal circumstances.
JAWS: the Beatles honed their skills playing long sets in Hamburg's clubs. Stuart Supliff John's friend from art school left in 1961 and Pete Best was the drummer before Ringo.
Jonathan Mosen: And now we go back to the slide view.
JAWS: F6, slide thumbnails tab. F6, slide area.
Jonathan Mosen: And now we are back in our slide area. Now we're on to the second to last slide. This is actually this last content slide. And this is slide five. And that's when Ringo arrives in the final lineup. So slide five will cover Ringo Starr joining in 1962 completing The Fab Four. All right, so we're going to press Ctrl M to create a new slide.
JAWS: Slide five.
Jonathan Mosen: And we are going to just type in the title. I'll press tab,
JAWS: Title placeholder.
Jonathan Mosen: And enter.
JAWS: Enter. Edit. 1962, Ringo joins.
Jonathan Mosen: Simple as that. And Ctrl Enter.
JAWS: Ctrl Enter. Edit.
Jonathan Mosen: Now we're in the body placeholder.
JAWS: Ringo Starr Becomes drummer after Beatles get recording contract. Enter.
Jonathan Mosen: And should we do one more? Yep, we'll do-
JAWS: Replaces Pete.
Jonathan Mosen: I should say I'm doing this without thinking about it. But you may not be aware it's a good idea to capitalize your bullet points on these PowerPoint slides. So now the final bullet point.
JAWS: Band's first single is, quote, "Love Me Do." Quote. Space.
Jonathan Mosen: And Enter.
JAWS: Enter.
Jonathan Mosen: So we have our three bullet points. This slide doesn't necessarily need an image since we did one already, but you can add another image or even an audio clip for Ringo's drums or anything you want here. And that could kind of spice it up a little bit. I am going to add a speaker's note to this, so I'll press F6.
JAWS: F6, description edit.
Jonathan Mosen: The alt text pane is still open now.
JAWS: F6, view indicator slide. F6, upper ribbon expanded. F6, leaving menus. 1962 Ringo joined. Slide 5 of 5. Edit.
Jonathan Mosen: We'll add our speakers notes here into the speaker notes field.
JAWS: Leaving slide. slide four. Slide five. Enter. 1962.
Jonathan Mosen: Now let's have a quick look at the speaker notes.
JAWS: On August 18, 1962 Ringo Starr officially joined the Beatles replacing Pete Best on drums with John, Paul, George and Ringo. Together the classic Beatles lineup was set off in called The Fab Four. Shortly after they recorded Love Me Do.
Jonathan Mosen: We are going to create one final slide. And this one is going to be a closing slide. Let me just get us back to a known reference point.
JAWS: F6 slide thumbnails tab. F6 slide area.
Jonathan Mosen: So I'm going to press Ctrl M to create a new slide. Then we're going to do something different.
JAWS: Slide six.
Jonathan Mosen: This time let's choose a different layout to demonstrate how you can change the layout when a slide is created. To do that we press Alt H.
JAWS: Upper ribbon expanded. Ribbon Home tab.
Jonathan Mosen: And then L.
JAWS: Title and content button selected 2 of 9.
Jonathan Mosen: And what we have now is the gallery again. So you can change the layout when a slide is already in existence. And I am going to find an item called, "Title only," by using right arrow to navigate through the gallery.
JAWS: L, section header. Button two. Content button. For comparison button. Title only button.
Jonathan Mosen: There are some other options here but that's the one I want. So I'm going to press Enter for title only.
JAWS: Enter. Slide six. 6 of 6.
Jonathan Mosen: So all we have here if I tab,
JAWS: Title placeholder.
Jonathan Mosen: We've got the title placeholder and then the thumbnails of the slides and that's all. So I'm now going to put in the title.
JAWS: Enter. Edit. The Beatles formed [inaudible 00:39:46].
Jonathan Mosen: The Beatles formed. The Fab Four have arrived. I can just press escape.
JAWS: Escape. Selected. The Beatles formed. The Fab Four have arrived.
Jonathan Mosen: All right and now we have that in quite big text, because it is title text. And it's basically making a loud closing statement there. That's not a practice that you would want to use all the time. But it is appropriate I think for a final slide. If you wanted to, but we've done this already five times we won't do it here, you could add a speaker notes just reminding you to thank the audience. And then you're essentially done with the basics of the creation. I'm going to do another save.
JAWS: Ctrl S.
Jonathan Mosen: I'll press Ctrl S to do that. At this point it's wise to review what we have created. So you can use the slide pane. So if I Shift Tab here. Now I can up and down arrow.
JAWS: 1962 Ringo joined slide has notes 5 of 6. The Beatles in Germany slide. Has notes. 4 of 6.
Jonathan Mosen: So I'm just up arrowing through the thumbnails on the main slide screen. When I tab to it with JAWS, at the moment JAWS is actually speaking nothing at all. But that's what you're in. You're in the thumbnails screen there and if you want to hear the contents of a slide you can just press F6 to go to the main view or even tab to go to the slides. And then you can use all the reading keys to navigate the slides. You should check for any obvious mistakes like typos. You can edit text just by focusing it and typing as we did. It's just a standard edit field.
And our content is basically ready. Now I want though to add some finishing touches, transitions between slides. And we'll add an audio cue for slide changes as well. A slide transition as I mentioned earlier is the effects that plays when you advance to the next slide. By default it's just a cut, there's no effect at all. But we can add a simple fade or a dissolve. As a blind presenter a subtle chime sound when the slide changes, particularly if you're a novice PowerPoint presenter, just might give you a bit of peace of mind. Because it will confirm that your key press succeeded and the slide has changed. It can also signal to the audience that we've moved on to another part of the presentation. But usually a visual change is enough for your audience. We'll apply the same transition to all slides for consistency. So to do this we are going to press Alt K to go to the transition tab on the ribbon.
JAWS: Alt K.
Jonathan Mosen: And we don't get any feedback, but I'm going to press tab.
JAWS: Record button not checked. Present in teams button not checked.
Jonathan Mosen: I'm continuing to tab.
JAWS: Comments button not checked. Menu. Share sub menu. Leaving menus. Preview button unavailable. Upper ribbon, sub menu collapsed. Sub menu, transition effects button collapsed. Pick a special effect for the transition between the previous slide and this one.
Jonathan Mosen: That's the one we want. So we are going to press Enter to choose a transition effect.
JAWS: Enter none. The slide doesn't have a transition effect. Button selected 1 of 13.
Jonathan Mosen: There are a few transition effects, some of which are more sort of dramatic than others. We want to be subtle about this. And one that is fairly subtle is simply called fade. So I'm going to write arrow until I find fade,
JAWS: Morph, move things on the previous slide to their new locations on the current slide to get the best results. One, duplicate a slide. Two, move things around. Three apply the morph transition. Anything you add or delete will fade in or out. Button 2 of 13 fade. The previous slide fades away revealing the current slide button 3 of 13.
Jonathan Mosen: What I really like about this is that Microsoft has made an effort to describe to us as blind people what these transition effects look like. So you do have some knowledge of what it is you're applying. I'm going to press Enter to apply the fade transition, but if you want you can come back in here and explore the other ones.
JAWS: Enter. The Beatles in Germany slide has notes 4 of 6.
Jonathan Mosen: Next for the sound we're going to go back to the transitions tab and then we're going to press the letter U for uniform.
JAWS: Alt. Upper ribbon expanded. Ribbon transitions tab. No sound button selected 1 of 22.
Jonathan Mosen: And now we are on a list of sounds, some of which are quite raucous and noticeable. So you've got this list of sound here and we can just arrow through them. Down arrow in this case. It's not consistent. So with some of these other screens that we saw you hit to left and right arrow. In this case you need to up and down arrow. And I want to pick a subtle one. And one of the subtle ones is called Chime. So I'm just going to down arrow to find it and then I'll press enter when I do.
JAWS: U stop previous sound button. Applause button. Arrow button. Bomb button. Breeze button. Camera button. Cache register button. Chime button 9 of 22.
Jonathan Mosen: And we'll press Enter.
JAWS: Enter the Beatles in Germany's slide has notes. 4 of 6.
Jonathan Mosen: Still on the transitions tab. What we want to do now is apply this to all of our slides. And to do that we're going to press Alt K again to get back into the transitions tab,
JAWS: Alt. Upper ribbon expanded. Ribbon transitions tab 6 of 13.
Jonathan Mosen: And we're going to press L to apply to all slides.
JAWS: Leaving menus. The Beatles in Germany slide has notes.
Jonathan Mosen: So transitions with sounds can be helpful, but do make sure that the sound isn't too distracting or long. A quick chime or a click. Another one that I like a lot actually is called camera. That's fine. There is a long applause sound in here and there's a drum roll that really gets old pretty fast. In many cases presenters especially in professional settings don't use sound at all. So now it is time to present our slides. And this is where all your preparation pays off.
Slideshow mode in PowerPoint is designed for presenting to an audience, either in person or over a virtual meeting like this one. As a blind presenter you'll typically have your screen reader running in the background and maybe an earbud in one ear so you can hear without the audience hearing your screen reader. Or you might be using a Braille display for totally silent reading of notes.
So let's go through how to start the slideshow. Navigate through slides and also access your speaker notes, the all-important notes that we took so much time to create. To begin the presentation from the start you would press the F5 key in the PowerPoint window. If you wanted to start from the current slide for practice, say you've just created a really cool slide and you want to see how it looks in the slideshow view then you would press Shift F5. And that'll pick up from the current slide. But we are going to start from the beginning. So I'm just going to start that now with our title slide and we'll leave that on the screen for a bit. I'll press the F5
JAWS: F5, the formation of the beatles.pptx PowerPoint. The formation of the Beatles slide has notes. Slide one, the formation of the Beatles. Heading level one, the formation of the Beatles webinar demo by the National Federation of the Blind.
Jonathan Mosen: Now we're in the slideshow view. If you have one screen your view is now the full screen slide, but if you have dual monitors or you're connected to a projector so you might be running on your laptop and you might be connected to a projector through an HDMI cable or something like that. By default PowerPoint shows the slides on the external display for your audience to see and a thing called presenter view on your computer.
Presenter view is a special mode where the presenter can see extras like the current slide, your notes and a preview of the next slide all on your screen while the audience only sees the current slide. Genius. It is very useful if you can see, but it's also useful with a screen reader because it gives access to notes regardless of which screen reader you are running.
Now here's where I do have to make a distinction. JAWS has a significant advantage in PowerPoint when you're presenting slides. Because it can display your speaker notes in the virtual viewer when a user presses Ctrl Shift N. This can happen in slideshow mode. So if you only have one screen and it isn't practical to use presenter mode this is a real advantage. If you can't use presenter mode, because you only have one screen and you use NVDA or narrator you might like to consider having your speaker notes on another device like a note taker or Braille display with note taker functions or even your smartphone with the right tool.
You could use a word processor type package on your smartphone and move through the slides with your earbuds and move through the speaker notes that way if necessary. PowerPoint has specific keyboard shortcuts in presenter view to help you read things without disrupting the slideshow. So I'm going to just show you this briefly. We'll go into presenter mode by bringing up the context key.
JAWS: Applications. Group. Next 1 of 3. Previous unavailable. Last viewed unavailable. See all slides. One of magnify slide show presenter view 1 of 3.
Jonathan Mosen: I'm going to show presenter you briefly.
JAWS: Leaving menus. The formation of the Beatles. Leaving menus. Presenter.
Jonathan Mosen: Now each time you press Alt A.
JAWS: John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met at St. Peter's Church Fete in Wilton on July 6th, 1957. John's band The Quarrymen was playing. A mutual friend introduced Paul.
Jonathan Mosen: It will read the next chunk of your speaker notes as similarly Alt plus Z.
JAWS: Alt Z, John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met at St Peter's-
Jonathan Mosen: Okay, so it's reading the same thing in this case because the speaker notes are short. But Alt Z will read the previous line of notes for you. There are also shortcuts like Alt W, which will read how long you've been speaking.
JAWS: Alt W 38 seconds elapsed.
Jonathan Mosen: All right, so it's 38 seconds since we ran presenter mode. And if we press Alt Q, you'll hear what's coming next.
JAWS: Alt Q. Next slide three. George joins the band.
Jonathan Mosen: We are going to just get out of this.
JAWS: Escape. The formation of the beatles.pptx PowerPoint.
Jonathan Mosen: And I'm going to go back into the slideshow,
JAWS: The formation of the... Heading level one.
Jonathan Mosen: There we go. We're back in slideshow mode now, which is what the audience sees. So let's proceed as if we were delivering our Beatles presentation using JAWS in slideshow mode. So we've started the show. And we are on slide one. And the audience sees the title slide, the formation of the Beatles. As the presenter you should introduce the topic. You might glance at or listen to your speaker notes. If you're in JAWS, we can just press Ctrl Shift N.
JAWS: This is the demo presentation I gave to the boutique on creating a PowerPoint presentation as a blind person.
Jonathan Mosen: And now that's in the virtual viewer. I can arrow around it. I can just press the escape key to dismiss the virtual viewer and get back to my slide. When you're ready to go to the next slide just press the page down key or you can press the spacebar. Both work. And that will advance to the next slide. What we hopefully will hear is the chime sound. And visually if you can see the screen you'll see the fade effect that we put in place. And then JAWS should start to speak slide two.
JAWS: Has notes. Slide two early days. John and Paul. Heading level one. Early days John and Paul. List of one items. Bullet, 1957 John Lennon meets Paul McCartney. List of one items. Nesting level one. Bullet, they performed together.
Jonathan Mosen: I let that talk because that list of one items nesting level one is important. On this slide we indented the text on the second bullet point, so we did get confirmation that that second bullet point is indented. So we also heard the chime sound so that is working correctly as well. It's always good when everything behaves itself in this life situation, isn't it? And we can also just press our speaker notes key in JAWS, Ctrl Shift N if you want. So you can speak to slide two while it's on the screen using your speaker notes as a guide, as a prompt. We then go to the next slide.
JAWS: Has notes. Slide three. George joins the band. Heading level one.
Jonathan Mosen: So now we're on to George joins the band. And if at any point you want to go back to a slide you can press the backspace key or page up if you want to do that. Now here's a handy tip as well. You can also jump to a specific slide by number. All you have to do is press the number of the slides you want and then type Enter. So if I want to go back to the title slide, slide one I type 1, I press Enter.
JAWS: 1. Enter. Has notes. Slide one. The formation of the Beatles.
Jonathan Mosen: And now we're back on slide one. Let's go back to the slide we were on in the same way. 3, and I hit Enter.
JAWS: Has notes. Slide three. George joins the band.
Jonathan Mosen: Of course this is very cool, but it does require you to remember the slide numbers. Let's go to the all-important slide four, which had a bit of activity on it.
JAWS: Has notes. Slide four. The Beatles in Germany. Heading level one, the Beatles in Germany. List of three items. Bullet, performances in Hamburg's clubs 1960, 1962. Bullet, Stuart Supliff on bass. Pete Best on drums. Bullet, Brian Epstein becomes manager in 1961. List end. The Beatles performing in Hamburg with Pete Best on drums. Graphic link Paul clip. Paul clip audio.
Jonathan Mosen: If we want to play this clip of Paul McCartney all we have to do is press Enter when we are ready. And we will hear Sir Paul himself long before he was Sir Paul, I think.
Paul McCartney: At that time we were just kids let off the leash really. Come straight from Liverpool to Hamburg.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah, thanks Paul. Good to have you on the webinar, mate. And if we want to escape out of this we can just press exactly that.
JAWS: Escape. The formation of-
Jonathan Mosen: And that we'll exit the slideshow. If we ran it all the way through eventually you would get to a closing screen. A couple more quick tips for live presenting. I would recommend practicing beforehand with your screen reader. Go through your slides multiple times if necessary so that you're comfortable with them. And this helps you know what the screen reader is going to say and when it will say it. Use a headphone or earbud for screen reader speech output during a live presentation if you use speech.
Obviously if you use a Braille display, you do have a significant advantage when it comes to something like PowerPoint. Manage timing. It is easy to lose track of your time. So keep each slide's talk within a reasonable length so you can finish on time. If you're presenting via Zoom or Teams you can consider sharing just the window with the slides and that'll avoid the audience seeing your notes.
If you use Presenter view you would share the full screen slideshow and not the presenter view window. There's a way to share and run the slideshow accessibly over Teams but not Zoom. You may want to consider using Scribe for meetings from numerous solutions, which will make the slideshow accessible to screen reader users even in a Zoom meeting.
Or you might distribute your slides ahead of time so blind people can follow along. Stay calm. Don't panic. It's all written in large friendly letters I tell you. Stay calm. If the tech hiccups it's not a big deal. Life will go on. If you accidentally go to the wrong slide or something like that. Just take a deep breath.
Speaker 3: The organized blind movement has joined the Lyft Roundup and Donate program so you can contribute every time you ride. Lyft will round up the cost of your ride to the nearest dollar and contribute the difference to the National Federation of the Blind. In the Lyft app simply go to the menu, navigate to Donate and select National Federation of the Blind from the list. Please encourage your family and friends who use Lyft to take part in the Roundup and Donate program to help blind people live the lives we want.
Jonathan Mosen: Highly recommend that when I got Lyft after moving permanently to the United States. It was easy to set that up and now whenever I travel by Lyft the National Federation of the Blind gets the benefit as well. What is not to like? A quick tech tip before we go. And this is for our iPhone using listeners. It relates to a feature called the Item Chooser. And in my experience a lot of people don't know about the Item Chooser or know what its value is.
And we could probably do a longer extended feature on this. We may well do that at some point. But in brief for this tech tip section if you perform a three finger double tap on your screen you will get a list of elements on the screen with a search field. And to narrow what you are looking for on the screen you can simply type part of what you are looking for on the screen into that search field.
Where this is useful is if you have a very busy screen. Let's say that you're using one of the online delivery platforms like UberEATS and DoorDash and you want to find a particular kind of cuisine and it's a very busy screen you're pretty sure that the name of the restaurant that you're interested in is on that screen. You could flick around and find it eventually or you could perform a two finger triple tap and bring up the item chooser.
Into the search field you would type part of the thing that you are looking for. And if it exists on the screen, voiceover will narrow the focus and bring you any matches. It could be one, it could be multiple matches. The item chooser is also available through Braille screen input these days. So it is a very handy way of getting at the screen.
Now, one of the hopes for Apple Intelligence was that Siri would also do a lot of this. And it may be coming, but Apple have indicated that there've been some delays in some of the Siri related functions of Apple intelligence. So we really don't know when that might happen. But eventually Siri is supposed to be able to understand screen context. That means that ultimately you should be able to ask Siri to activate an item for you on the screen. But you can't do that yet. So take a look at the Item Chooser. It is a very efficient way of engaging with your iPhone, particularly on very busy screens.
That concludes this episode of Access on the Technology Podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. To send in a contribution for a future episode email us attach an audio clip, or just write it down and send it to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. To keep up to date with Access On, follow us on Mastodon. [email protected].
That's [email protected] on Mastodon. To subscribe to an announcement only email list about upcoming episodes send a blank message to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. To learn more about the National Federation of the Blind, visit our website, nfb.org. Or phone us 410-659-9314. That's 410-659-9314. And be sure to check out the Nation's Blind podcast right from where you heard this podcast.