5 Tips for Accessible Virtual Presentations

People are giving virtual presentations every day, whether it’s in a staff meeting, virtual classroom, public webinar, or some other type of presentation. These five tips will help make your next virtual presentation more accessible for all.

1. Ask attendees and co-presenters if they need an accommodation in advance

Know attendees' needs before you give your presentation. If you know an accommodation is needed in advance, you’ll be better prepared to ensure the attendee has access during your event. Sending out an accessible survey before your presentation is a great way to assess accommodation needs.

If you’re presenting virtually to the campus community, read our Virtual Events Guide for Meeting Hosts resource for examples on how to ask about accommodation needs.

If you’re teaching a course, the Center for Teaching and Learning has an excellent Technology and Accessibility Survey you can give to your students. These survey questions will provide you with valuable information regarding student accommodation needs that can help remove learning barriers.

2. Share your materials

We’ve covered the benefits of sharing slide decks before in our Sharing (Your Slides) is Caring newsletter. In short, many people benefit from having access to your slide deck and other materials such as handouts before and after the presentation. It’s also important to ensure that attendees have access to any links you share through the chat. You can either put the links in your shared slide deck, or you can send a follow-up email with the links included.

3. Provide verbal descriptions of visual content

Bear in mind not everyone will always be able to see the screen when you are presenting. In order to make sure everyone can access the visual components of your presentation, practice providing verbal descriptions of visual content. Providing verbal descriptions can also help attendees understand the meaningful content behind images and diagrams in the presentation.

4. Record your presentation

Hit the record button on your next virtual presentation and share it with attendees. Having a recording allows people to go back and revisit content they’re still unclear about or have forgotten. Providing recordings supports individuals with a variety of disabilities and learning preferences.

Note: make sure you always let attendees know when the presentation is being recorded.

5. Caption it!

During the event, make sure you enable live automated captions in Zoom. This is a setting that needs to be toggled in your Zoom account settings ahead of time in order to be functional during the presentation. Once you’ve enabled this setting, the “Live Transcript” button will then be available whenever you’re in your Zoom room. You can also use live captions in Microsoft Teams meetings.

Captions benefit many people! Read our post-production captions newsletter for more information about captioning your recorded videos. Our YouTube Captioning Tutorial demonstrates how to edit auto-generated captions in YouTube for accuracy. Email captioning@colorado.edu for support with adding captions to your recordings.

Already using these best practices? Try these additional tips!

  • Read up on PowerPoint accessibility to create more accessible PowerPoint presentations.
  • Give the audience an overview of what to expect and how to participate. For example, if you would like participants to unmute themselves during the presentation to ask questions, let them know.
  • Allow people to keep their cameras off.
  • Use high color contrast in presentations.
  • Give people multiple ways to respond to you. Not everyone is comfortable unmuting themselves to speak to the group as a whole. When you want participation, allow people to comment or ask questions in the chat, unmute, or use the raise hands feature to be called on.

January Challenge

Practice providing verbal descriptions of visual content! This could be an image you’re using in a presentation or even your Zoom background. How would you describe the image to someone who cannot see the image?

Your Thoughts

We want to hear from you about any questions or issues you run into while trying out this accessibility practice this month! Please send us your thoughts on this month’s topic.

If you have questions or comments, or would like support with accessibility, please contact us at DigitalAccessibility@Colorado.edu.