Accessibility

Your talk and your slides should be accessible to as many people as possible. This is relevant (but not limited to) to people who are (color-)blind, have low vision, are deaf or have hearing difficulties, mobility impairments or cognitive disabilities. There are some very good and informative articles on accessibility topics that you can find here:

The most important points are summarized below:

  1. If you are using colors in your slides, make sure to add enough contrast. Ensure sufficient contrast between text and its background.
  2. Don’t use color alone to make critical information understandable - instead, only use color to highlight or complement what is already visible. Don't rely on sensory characteristics as the sole indicator for understanding and operating content: You should not rely solely on images, shape, size, visual location, orientation, or sound to indicate important instructions for operating or understanding content (ex. “See the image above”). Instead, use a combination of positioning, color, and labeling to identify content.
  3. If you are including images in your slides you might want to consider to give a short vocal description of the visual content, keeping in mind blind and vision impaired people.
  4. Generally, have big fonts and less content on one presentation slide, instead of small fonts and lots of information on one slide. This makes the text easier readable and the content easier to grasp.
  5. Be considerate of people with epilepsy / photosensitive seizure disorders and avoid flashing effects in your presentation.

Below you will find online tools that you can check your material with:

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us, and feel free to let us know if this guide has been useful to you or could be improved!