Mindsets & skills

Making learning inclusive — A template for accessible presentations

Image by Finn Skagn @ Unsplash

Designing inclusive learning

Building in accessibility into old and new workflows can be challenging.

In a learning context, as in many others, accessibility is not just about alt text and good colour contrast, it is also about creating an environment that is inclusive. A space that is welcoming and comfortable for people with different needs and from different walks of life.

It might be awkward and hard to make a place that is inclusive for a diverse group of people, but all that labour and efforts pay off when we can make strangers feel at home.

Since running our first Design cohort at The Canada School of Public Service Digital Academy, one of the things we’ve committed to improve in our next cohort is integrating accessibility from the start.

While this is a multipronged approach including tailoring intake to ensure better representation of genders, skills levels, regional and central representation, there was one opportunity that stood out to me as the simplest way to ensure our learning, learners and instructors were starting to think in terms of accessibility — make the learning itself accessible.

An ambitious goal in itself yet something manageable, if broken down into smaller pieces.

As the lead for the 7 week Design learning stream, coordinating and supporting curriculum development with 10 different instructors, I figured that the easiest way to get our materials to a more inclusive start is to create an accessible PowerPoint template. It is not ideal by any means, however many instructors still rely on the traditional presentation deck to deliver training, so we might as well start with the materials our audiences use.

Designing an accessible template

I did a quick Twitter scan, asked around what was available and unsatisfied with my findings proceeded to research and develop a new template on my own. I wanted to create something modern and that at once could be used as a template and also serve as an example of an accessible presentation.

The graphic is inspired by the Columbia University’s suggestions for creating effective academic presentations. They suggest that presenters keep in mind 4 concepts when creating their presentations: 1. Big — use large fonts that are easy to read. 2. Simple — limit text to 6 lines on a slide and no more than 7 words per line. Be concise. 3. Clear — use sans-serif fonts and high-contrast visuals. Add alt text, slide notes, and write descriptive titles and hyperlinks. 4. Consistent — arrange content in a logical order, with proper transitions, titles and headings.

For the Design Stream instructors, I used The School’s corporate template as a base, modifying it to speak to accessibility standards while demonstrating them in a sample presentation.

The sample presentation briefly covers the basics of what makes any visual on a screen accessible, including the following elements:

• Colours
• Fonts
• White space
• Images
• Tables and graphs
• Titles and headings
• Hyperlinks
• Order and flow
• Slide notes
• Multimedia
• Final document format

The slides do not go into how to present effectively or how to design for the big auditorium screen vs small screen viewing, if this is what you are looking for, take a look at the Smashing Magazine’s article on Inclusive Design For Accessible Presentations.

Having spent a few days putting this together and reviewing the translation (since part of being inclusive is offering all training materials in both official languages), as well as having received a few positive reactions, I felt that someone else might benefit from the templates that I’ve created.

To make them reusable, I’ve removed the Government branding and colour templates and created 2 new accessible colour themes, both can be found in each of the templates, but I selected a different one for English and French versions, just to showcase the difference.

Two accessible colour themes available in the templates (teal and violet).

Feel free to use these templates for your own presentations, modify and share. You can create your own colour themes and add them to the current templates too.

While I’ve spent the time testing all the colours and trying to ensure I adhere to everything that I’ve preached, there may be omissions; we are all human, so please be kind if you find an issue and let me know :)

• Accessible presentation template in English
• Quick reference — accessible presentation in English
• Accessible presentation template in French
• Quick reference — accessible presentation in French

Lesson learned to be shared

While I want to share the templates and I hope they can be useful to others, I also have to share something else.

Working on developing these has helped me learn about certain aspects of accessibility I did not previously know about and also reinforced my ability to create accessible presentations. It was an excellent and practical exercise that made me experience the effort of doing it right.

I don’t think I will ever be able to set aside accessibility requirements now that I’ve experienced how to integrate them into my work — it’s a beautiful realization that comes with learning by doing.

Update

July 21, 2020

The presentation templates and quick reference have been updated to include:

• guidance about adding raw URLs into slide notes, as linked words and sentences in your slides may not be accessible to keyboard navigation
• graphics in French for the French documents