LECSHARE—CREATING ACCESSIBLE HTML FROM MICROSOFT
POWERPOINT
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Presenter #1
Greg Kraus
LecShare, Inc.
Clayton
NC
27528
USA
Day Phone: 919.934.3810
Fax:
Email: greg@lecshare.com
LecShare allows Windows and Macintosh
users to create accessible HTML from Microsoft PowerPoint. A
demonstration of LecShare will be given by a company
representative.
Many instructors and presenters rely heavily on Microsoft PowerPoint for
the preparation and delivery of their lectures, and PowerPoint has become
ubiquitous in the field of presentations. PowerPoint offers many powerful
and easy to use tools that allow for great flexibility and creativity in the
designing of presentations.
Despite the many benefits Microsoft PowerPoint offers, it also introduces
certain hurdles to creating content that is truly accessible to everyone and
creating web based content that meets Section 508 standards and the WCAG.
The Problems
* In PowerPoint, alternate text for images must be added manually for each
image in a presentation. The user is never prompted for this information
and there is no convenient way to check that alternate text has actually been
entered for every image. Alternate text is not even available on the
Macintosh version of Microsoft PowerPoint.
* Charts and tables do not present the underlying data when PowerPoint is
exported to HTML
* Screen readers will read the items on a slide in the order in which they
were created on the slide, not necessarily from top to bottom and from left to
right. The read order of a slide is next to impossible for the average
user to determine. Presenters cannot ensure the order in which people
using assistive technologies will read the slide.
* The file sizes of some PowerPoint files reach over 80MB, making them very
difficult to distribute over the Internet. PowerPoint does not have a way
to automatically reduce the sizes of images as they are imported, and sometimes
still cannot compress files to a degree that makes them easily deliverable over
the Web.
The Solution
LecShare provides tools that allow both
Windows and Macintosh users to create HTML files from their PowerPoint
presentations that meet Section 508 accessibility standards and the guidlelines set out by the WAI (Web Accessibility
Initiative). In addition, LecShare files can be
quickly delivered to virtually any device connected to the Internet, no matter
the connection speed. LecShare allows users to:
* Add Alternate Text (alt tags, d-links, or null tags) to any image in
PowerPoint, including PowerPoint files on Macintosh computers;
* Instantly check to see if any alternate text is
missing from any image in the whole presentation.
* Extract data from charts and graphs and present the data in standard HTML
tables
* Put the proper heading and scope tags in tables;
* Easily see and rearrange the order a screen reader will read the items on
a slide;
* Create much smaller files by converting images and slides to the JPEG
format;
* Ensure that each slide has a proper title so the Table of Contents won’t
be a list of “Slide 1, Slide 2, Slide 3, etc.”;
* Put transcripts or notes in the Lecturer’s Notes section of PowerPoint
and have those appear with every page of a PowerPoint presentation.
LecShare outputs a set of web pages that
use HTML and CSS. The content and structure are kept completely separate,
so customized style sheets can be used to have complete control over the way a
web page displays.
In addition, LecShare can also export images of the
slides into Microsoft Word documents for presenters to distribute. A
person attending a lecture could load the Microsoft Word document on his or her
laptop and take notes directly in Word right next to the images of the slides.
No more having to take hand notes on the 3 or 6 slides per page that
PowerPoint creates!
One of the great benefits of LecShare is that you
no longer have to have two versions of a presentation: one for “regular” web
pages and one which meets accessibility standards. LecShare
produces a single output that is both functional and appealing to everyone.
Again, you can completely customize the layout of the pages by using the
built in layout settings or by using your own css
file.
LecShare takes the world’s most popular
presentation software and allows it to be shared with and accessible to
everyone. The goal of LecShare is to meet
lecturers at their skill level – not to make them master an entire new set of
skills (HTML, CSS, Section 508 standards, etc.). Making accessible web-based
PowerPoint presentations is now within the reach of any lecturer.
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