Hi, Microsoft 365 Insiders! I’m Peter Wu, a Principal Software Engineer on the PowerPoint team. I’m excited to announce an improvement to Microsoft PowerPoint for Mac that allows you to adjust the order content in a presentation is read when someone is using an accessibility tool.
New Reading Order Pane in PowerPoint for Mac to make slides accessible
When you’re crafting a presentation, you want your audience to read slide content in the order you intended. Otherwise, they might not be able make any sense of it or miss important points. Or worse, they might get the wrong message.
But did you know that when people who are blind or have low vision read slides with a screen reader, sometimes the content is read in a different order than how it’s laid out? In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day last week, I’m excited to introduce the Reading Order Pane in PowerPoint for Mac – now, you can visualize the order content will be read and adjust it as needed. This feature is already available in PowerPoint for Windows, and we’re so happy to bring it to more people!
How it works
- Open a new or existing presentation in PowerPoint on your Mac device.
- Select the Review tab, click the dropdown arrow next to Check Accessibility, and select Reading Order Pane. Or, open the Reading Order Pane via the Accessibility tab that appears when the Accessibility Assistant is open. From here, you can see objects and text boxes listed in the order they’ll be read.
- Group objects together by holding Command on your keyboard, clicking the items in the Reading Order Pane, then hitting Command + Option + G.
- Set the alt text of this group by selecting the Edit button to the right of the item, typing a description, and selecting Save. This is what the screen reader will read and what will appear in the title of the item in the Reading Order Pane.
- Add alt text for items that have a warning symbol, or uncheck the checkbox to exclude it from the reading order if it’s not important for understanding the meaning of the slide. A dash will appear next to items that will not be read by a screen reader.
- Sort items into the order you want them to be read by clicking the Move Up or Move Down buttons when an item is selected, or dragging and dropping the item to the desired position.
Tips and tricks
- Use the Accessibility Assistant to help find slides that may have a poor reading order. Keep in mind that Accessibility Assistant doesn’t always know whether the reading order on the slide is good, and you should judge whether the adjustments you have made are sufficient for screen reader users to read and understand the slide.
- For objects that overlap, changing the reading order may affect how they visually stack. If the slide doesn’t look the way you want it to, you may need to undo changes you made to the reading order.
- The title object should be placed first in the reading order if it doesn’t overlap with other objects. The subtitle object, if there is one, should be placed next. In most cases, you should also lay out objects visually in a way that sighted users are likely to read them (i.e., left to right, then top to bottom).
Availability
The Reading Order Pane is available in PowerPoint for Mac for Beta Channel users running Version 16.98 (Build 25050901) or later.
Don’t have it yet? It’s probably us, not you.
Features are released over some time to ensure things are working smoothly. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as an Insider, have had the opportunity to try it.
Feedback
We want to hear from you! Please click Help > Feedback in PowerPoint to submit your thoughts about this feature.
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