Reading Order in PowerPoint

Stephanie: Welcome to Accessibility in 5. A series from UFIT, where we explore a quick tip on making your content more accessible in 5 minutes or less. I'm Stephanie, and today's topic is reading order in PowerPoint.

When designing a presentation, you try to organize your content in a logical way so that your audience knows exactly what they should focus on first, second, and so on. But what if your audience can't see your presentation? You need some way to allow people to also experience your presentation in your intended order. This is where reading order enters the scene.

Reading order is a way that allows you to specify what order a screen reader should read items from your PowerPoint presentation so that it reflects your visual organization of content. This term might sound familiar because there's also reading order in PDF files, but this video is strictly focusing on PowerPoint files.

Anyone who creates PowerPoint files should be aware of reading order and how to set it, but it can sound daunting and more complicated than it is. In PowerPoint, the easiest way to access the Reading Order pane is by selecting Review from the main ribbon at the top of PowerPoint. Then you should click on the downward arrow underneath the Check Accessibility button and select Reading Order pane.

From there, you'll see a new side panel appear on the right-hand side of your presentation that has a numbered list starting at 1 and different types of content along with a preview listed to the right of the number. If you select any of the items in the list, a selection box will appear around that piece of content to show you what part of the presentation you're focusing on.

When starting with reading order on a PC, you'll want to have the numbers correspond with the items in your slides, reading from top to bottom and left to right. You'll always start with the unique title and then your first piece of content, followed by the next, so on and so forth. On Mac, this process is slightly different in that the pane will be called the Selection pane instead of Reading Order, and your items will be in reverse order.

Your title will appear at the bottom of the list, and as you move upward in the list, you move downwards visually on the slide. This difference can be confusing, and many tutorials will say that the PC version of PowerPoint sets reading order in the same way. However, with the more recent versions of PowerPoint, this has been changed.

When looking for more information about reading order and PowerPoint, please refer to Microsoft's tutorial on how to use reading order in PowerPoints. Thanks for watching Accessibility in 5. You can find this video, as well as previous ones, archived in the Resources section of the CITT website at citt.ufl.edu. Tune in next time to learn about Universal Design for Learning.