Bright PowerPoint
Authors: Lorenzo Campioni, Andrea Peano, Evelina Lamma
Bright PowerPoint is an add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint that supports the creation of accessible presentations for visually handicapped users. Visually handicapped users access slides by means of screen readers, so you should take this into account when creating presentations for this community.
Bright PowerPoint is open-source and allows for:
- using simplified slide templates that help the user to create more accessible slides;
- using only some particular built-in functionalities of PowerPoint, so that slides cannot be enriched with disturbing elements;
- inserting alternative text to figures and charts;
- defining an order among the elements in a slide, the order will be exported in HTML and followed by the screen readers;
- using the built-in text to speech functionalities in Windows in order to test how the slide would be read by screen readers... without either installing a screen reader or exporting in HTML;
- exporting the PPTX file into a HTML document (with a proper structure: index, navigation buttons and so on...) that implements some good editing rules for accessibility.
Here the Bright PowerPoint ribbon's tab (Italian):
A guide to Bright PowerPoint is part of the Lorenzo Campioni's B.Sc thesis, available here (oops, Italian, again!).
An extended abstract was presented at DIDAMATICA 2016 and can be found here (Italian).
The software is somehow stable, however it should be further tested; in particular, the software should be tested by users (editors), and the HTML output should be tested by visually handicapped users.
To obtain the source code, as well as for any other information, comment, suggestion you might need, please send an email to Andrea Peano.
