Video Transcripts : Slide Titles: One Accessibility Topic at a Time

When visual content is read or explained in audio, it is not reproduced in the visual column below.

Visual

Anaya demonstrates in PowerPoint and Google Slides as she describes in the video. All slide content is included in audio.

Audio

Today in one accessibility topic at a time, we're going to do a quick medium dive on slide titles in PowerPoint and Google Slides. So right now we're in PowerPoint. We have a sample presentation here, and I'm going to go ahead and advance to the next slide. So the general idea here is that slide. We need to have a slide title for every slide. So we are currently looking at an example slide. We have our slide content, which is currently bulleted. And then we also have the slide title. The slide title generally appears at the top of the slide. And the text box that appears in a template for a slide title is different programmatically than other textboxes.

So every slide needs a title, and that title should be unique to that slide. We want to avoid having duplicate slide titles. It's can sometimes be an issue when we have a long list of resources, for example, or a multi-step process. It's not to say that it's particularly difficult to do this well, just to keep in mind that we don't want to have three slides titled Resources. Instead, maybe we have resources, resources continued or general resources, specific resources. You get the idea. Slide titles serve a similar purpose that headers serve in other types of documents, like word documents or HTML pages, things like that.

But what if you don't want a slide title? So in this case, we have a template that had a slide title here. You know, we do we want to have the slide. You need to have the slide title in some capacity. But there are ways that we can make it so that the slide title doesn't appear on the slide. And there are a couple of different ways to accomplish that. So the deleting it entirely is not a good idea, but we could do a couple of different things.

So in PowerPoint, if we come up to the arrange option in the home ribbon and come all the way down, select the selection pane, it'll show us all of the content. Now, so here is our title that was previously hidden, and the way that we would hide it is by finding the title in the selection pane and then toggling The eye icon. Now it's kind of an abstract eye, it doesn't look, I think very much like an eye, but it is sort of a circle with a swoop over the top. So if we click that our title will be hidden or shown depending on what it was before.

There's another way to do this, and that is by selecting the title and then moving it off of the slide. Now, in both of these contexts, they're still going to do all of the same things that a slide title does programmatically, but it won't appear on the slide in the slide show view. Now, if we jump over to Google Slides, we have only the option to move it off of the slide. So you can see our slide title is up here [off the slide canvas]. I can move it back or I can move it off the slide so that it's not visible. We don't have a selection pane in Google slides, so the option to hide the title, we don't have that here.

But what if you accidentally delete the slide title? Well, in Google Docs, if we accidentally delete the slide title, you can see that here, our really our only option is to create a new slide from the template that has the slide title and either copy and paste or retype the slide content and title onto that new slide and then delete the first one. We can insert a text box, but again, that text box is not going to programmatically act the same way that the slide title did. So we would have an accessibility problem there.

Jumping back to PowerPoint, if we have a slide, a slide, and we accidentally delete our slide title. Again, it's hard to accidentally delete it, but you can. I want to show you what it looks like if we're trying to replace that title with irregular text box, right? Regular text box title. Now, I can change the size and look of this font to make it look more like a title. But unless it's it's programmatically determined to be a title, it's not going to matter. This text box is not doing the same work that the title is doing for the other slides.

And what does that how do I know that that might be a text box while in PowerPoint? (Unfortunately not in Google slides) we can initiate our accessibility checker. I can do that through the file option or I clicked accessibility investigate at the bottom of the screen, which opens our accessibility checker. Now it's flagging that slide four is missing a slide title. So it doesn't matter that I have this regular text box here. We are missing a title. However, PowerPoint you can still recreate your slide like we did in Google Slides, or we can come into the accessibility checker and we can use this drop-down button to do a couple of things. So we can either set this as a slide title. And I think we want to make sure that we have our regular text box highlighted here so we can set this as the slide title, which is going to give it the programmatic power to determine what the content of that slide is. Or we can add a slide title to this screen.

Now, why you would pick one of these options over the other is determined by what you want that title to look like. So if you have finagled the look of this text and you want to maintain that, we were going to set that as a slide title. If you don't like the way that this looks and you want the style of the title back, you're going to add a slide title and then retype the text for that option. So this is actually doesn't get rid of the other box, but does allow us to insert a title that comes with the style of our other one. And then, you know, if we were replacing the text, we could get rid of that box or move it to another place on the screen. So that addresses the accessibility issue there and we are free to continue.