Accessibility

An accessible presentation, whether it’s a talk or a poster, is a presentation created to enable everyone to see well, hear well, and understand the information presented.

By following simple guidelines, you can ensure that no one is left out. Accessible presentations are inclusive to all and respect every attendee’s needs.

By following simple guidelines, you can ensure that no one is left out. Accessible presentations are inclusive to all and respect every attendee’s needs.

When preparing your slides for your talk or your poster using PowerPoint (the preferred software for the conference):

1. Make text and visuals big enough to be read even from the back of the room.
   For oral presentations, we recommend not using font size smaller than 30.
2. Use a sans serif font face, such as Calibri or Arial.
   These font faces are easier to read from a distance. The letters appear less crowded for people with dyslexia.
3. Minimize the amount of text on each slide and poster.
   This should keep the focus of the audience on what you are saying, rather than just reading. If following the first guideline and you uses a larger font size, this won’t be an issue.
4. Make certain that colour is not the only mean to convey your information.
   People who have low vision or are colour-blind might have some difficulty grasping the information.
5. Be mindful of having sufficient contrast between colours.
   This includes having sufficient contrast between the text and colour of the background, and between colours in graphs. We recommend using a white background with black text. While this choice seems very boring, it provides the highest contrast in colour for most room settings. Regarding graphs, avoid yellow, lime, and cyan colours, as these colours are hard to see from far depending on the lighting condition in the room. Similarly, avoid combining green and red to convey information, as most colour-blind people have difficulty distinguishing between these colours.
6. For oral presentations, be mindful when using motion or animations.
   While animating a block of text in an oral presentation might help the audience to engage with the content, flying letters and/or images from all corners can be very distracting for some people. You should always ask yourself: will the motion make the information easier to understand? If the answer is no, you should probably refrain from using it.
7. Make your graphic as simple as possible, avoid presenting complex charts or tables, and don’t forget to add a meaningful legend.
   People might get lost trying to understand unnecessary information, which ultimately will lead to disengagement with the content you are presenting.
8. Provide bullet point summary of takeaway messages/claims conveyed by graphics.
   This summary will keep your audience engaged and improve understanding of the content.

When presenting your work as an oral presentation or a poster, you can make sure it is accessible to all by following these simple guidelines:

1. Speak clearly.
   By reducing your speech speed, your audience can better understand you and keep up with your presentation.
2. Use simple language.
   Avoid the use of jargon, acronyms, and idioms to ensure people outside your field of research can engage and learn from your presentation. When avoiding it is impossible, make sure to briefly define the non-obvious terms.
3. For oral presentations, use a microphone.
   You should use a microphone, even if you are in a small room. Using a microphone will allow everyone in the room to hear you clearly. Don’t forget that if you ask: “Can everyone hear me OK?,” some people might be uncomfortable saying they cannot.
4. For oral presentations, we ask that you enable the subtitle feature in PowerPoint (see below on how to do it).
   The use of subtitles will allow people who are hard-of-hearing to follow your presentation.
5. For oral presentations, describe pertinent parts of graphics, tables, schemes, chart, and videos before playing them.
   This simple action will help people with lower vision to grasp the information you are trying to convey.
6. Cover all displayed text.
   It doesn’t mean you should read your slides or poster words for words. However, you should cover all the information provided on your slides or poster.
7. For poster presentation, avoid crowding around a poster.
   If you see already that several people are in front of a poster, you should consider coming back to it a bit later. There are many more to look at during the conference. Clustering of people in front of a poster is blocking the passage for others.

• This feature is available in Office 365 for both Mac and PC, as well as PowerPoint for the web. To enable this feature, go on the Slide Show ribbon bar and select Subtitle Settings.
• In the setting, you can choose both the Spoken Language and the Subtitle Language. We recommend that you choose English, as this is the official language of the conference
• The position of the subtitle can also be selected; we recommend using the default setting Below Slide.
• You can modify the appearance of the subtitles, such as increasing the font, choosing the background colour, etc. To alter the appearance settings in Windows, go to Subtitle Settings > More Settings. For Mac users, go to Subtitle Settings > System Caption Preference.
• Finally, to have the subtitles starting when your Slide Show presentation start, from the ribbon Slide Show, you can navigate and select Always Use Subtitles.