As a person who is blind I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in presentations where the presenter has up on the screen a beautifully created PowerPoint with great accessibility but as a participant all I know is that they are presenting but can’t read the content of the current slide being shown because all the presentation tools (zoom, webex, meet, etc) just show an image of the person’s screen and nothing more. This means that all that beautiful work you did to make an accessible PowerPoint is never provided to participants. For years, the advice has been to send a copy of the PowerPoint to participants in advance so they can follow along. This for most is a terrible experience because a participant has to bounce around between 2 screens, keep track of what slide you are presenting about and hopefully get time to review the content of the slides because a good presenter doesn’t read his slide content but instead talks to the material.
For the first time in a mainstream virtual tool the content of the current slide can be provided to participants in real time with no extra intervention from the presenter. As an example, a participant using a screen reader can follow along with the same content as their sighted peers. One of the best features of Teams is that presentations shared to other users include object information, which allows adaptive technology users such as screen reader users (when their adaptive technology supports it) to engage with a presentation shared from someone else’s computer.
It does require the presenter to make sure they are sharing the PowerPoint in a specific way.
Sharing Content
To share content to participants of your meeting, click or activate the Share button. You’ll be presented with a list of options that includes sharing your screen, sharing a specific window or application, or sharing a specific document. You can also include system audio, so if you’re sharing a video or a presentation with audio, the audio will carry over to the other participants viewing your content.
To share a PowerPoint presentation with object information, select the PowerPoint presentation directly from the list as opposed to just sharing your screen or a specific application. By sharing in this way, the presentation is uploaded to Teams itself and automatically shared with all participants.
Only presentations that have been previously shared in a Teams meeting in this fashion will show up in the list. If your presentation isn’t in the list, click the Browse button above and to the right of the PowerPoint presentation list and you will be able to browse your OneDrive, SharePoint, or local computer for a presentation to share.
