While working on a Google Slides presentation celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), I thought it might be a good time to pause and write a few words about accessibility best practices for creating slide presentations.
Whether your slides are presented live, shared asynchronously, or posted online for a larger audience, the choices you make in structure, design, and language directly impact who can engage with your content.
With GAAD just around the corner, there’s no better time to revisit these fundamentals and help everyone build presentations that are clear, inclusive, and usable by everyone.
Delivering an accessible presentation determines whether your message is simply seen or truly understood. And when your presentation is on-demand and self-paced, like a public Google Slides deck, accessibility becomes even more critical. With no presenter to fill in the gaps, your slides have to do all the work. Here are a few best practices to help make your slides do the work well.
Start with Clear Structure
Think of your slide titles as navigation, not decoration. Each slide should have a unique, descriptive title that helps users understand where they are and what the slide is about.
In addition, using consistent layouts and accessible templates will keep your content organized and ensure a logical reading order, especially for screen reader users.
Slide Should Convey Meaning Without Prior Context
Each slide needs to make sense without referring to prior slides. Avoid building context across multiple slides. Your audience may be moving at their own pace by skipping ahead, revisiting sections, or accessing with assistive technology. Instead, treat each slide as a complete thought. If someone lands on it out of order, they should be able to understand the key message without having to piece together what came before.
Keep Content Readable
Use large fonts (sans-serif fonts such as Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, 18pt minimum for body text, 24pt+ for titles), strong color contrast, and simple layouts. Break ideas into short bullets instead of using dense paragraphs. Use plain language, stripping away clutter while retaining meaning, so users can focus on the slide's context and ideas rather than struggle with the words. The easier your slides are to scan, the easier they are to understand.
Don’t Leave Visuals Behind
Images, charts, and graphics should include meaningful ALT text. If a visual is important, add a short explanation on the slide itself. And don’t rely on color alone to communicate meaning. Make sure to use clear labels and / or distinct patterns so everyone can easily follow along.
Use Descriptive Links
Descriptive links help provide context and reduce cognitive load by making the destination clear without requiring surrounding text for explanation. For example, Download the accessibility checklist is far more useful than Click here or Read more.
It’s a shift in wording that helps everyone, especially people using screen readers, understand the context, scan content more efficiently, and decide what’s worth exploring.
Don’t Forget to Test!
Navigate your slides with only a keyboard, or review them with a screen reader enabled. These real-world checks often surface subtle barriers that can easily be missed during the design and development process, but they make a big difference in the user experience, where clarity and flow really matter.
Accessible slide presentations don’t just meet a standard. They are clearer, more adaptable, and ultimately more impactful because they are designed for every audience.
Designing with accessibility in mind means you’re doing more than just sharing information. You’re designing for understanding, participation, and meaningful engagement.
Resources
- Accessible Presentations
- Create Accessible Google Slides
- How do I make my Google Slides accessible?
- Make your document, presentation, sheets & videos more accessible
- Make your PowerPoint presentations accessible to people with disabilities
- PowerPoint & Google Slides Accessibility Guide: Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices (PDF)
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