Helping you with presenting, PowerPoint, and speaking
Sometimes you need to show a head shot of several people, such as a departmental team or the presenters for a presentation. The problem is that you ask them for a head shot and they all look different, like this. What are you going to do?
Don’t just resize them to make them the same size. Instead, you need to crop them so that they include approximately the same view, the same amount of head, shoulders, and body.
Here’s the result after cropping. [Read more…]
Not long ago, I created a presentation for a client that included a video with text on top. My client asked why she couldn’t see the text. After rechecking that other people could see it, I asked which version of PowerPoint she was using. It was Mac version 2008! Only 14 years ago… And yes, at that time, you couldn’t put text on top of a video.
So she asked which version she should get. I think others have the same question, as there are lots of choices!
People with visual disabilities may use a screen reader to read the screen to them. PowerPoint has features that work with screen readers and you can help to ensure that this experience is useful for people with visual disabilities. Accessibility is the concept of making any software more usable by people with disabilities.
Many companies and governmental organizations require that you make documents, including PowerPoint presentations, accessible.
Here, I’ll discuss a couple of PowerPoint accessibility features and give you a link to more information.
PowerPoint guides a screen reader to read text on a slide in a certain order. A simple principle you can use is to make sure every slide has a slide title that explains the main point of the slide, whether you show it or not.
What does that mean? If you want to create a slide with nothing but an image, for example, you can use the Title Only layout, type some meaningful text in the slide title placeholder, and then drag it off the screen.
Likewise, if you want to create a diagram, you can use the title placeholder as part of the diagram. Here’s an example: [Read more…]
Here’s my New Year’s card to you. It highlights photos I’ve taken during all 4 seasons, from New York, to Florida, to Iowa and Nebraska. I hope you enjoy it!
I have big plans for 2015 — a weekly 15-minute webinar series, a new/old e-book, and more. How about you? Leave a comment!
