To #blind people with experience with #PowerPoint, I need help! My school wants me to create a #presentation with speaker notes and graphics, and I’m having extreme trouble even getting started. My info text box with my name, school, and date covers everything up, and I can’t figure out moving it or how to get to speaker notes. I normally create assignments with #LaTeX, but I kept running into issues making a presentation that way. I’m on #Windows using #NVDA. Disability services made this sound doable and even easy, but so far that doesn’t seem to be the case.
#accessibility #MicrosoftPowerPoint #BlindStudent @mastoblind @main
@RareBird15 @mastoblind @main I am not blind, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
However, if you are open to trying yet another tool, I’d suggest looking into #Typst with the touying package. I really like it for presentations and the general workflow is similar to LaTeX/Beamer.
Iirc, they added full PDF/UA support to typst in the upcoming version 0.14.0 which you can already select in the web app or install via cargo. Idk if touying already supports that though.
@RareBird15 @mastoblind @main There is a lot of chatter and claims about creating meaningful PowerPoint including some NFB presentations. The Latex command line will still get a Blind person much farther than Powerpoint guesses and approximations!
@kfjelsted @mastoblind @main I have PDF/UA tagging metadata in my presentation and according to GitHub Copilot chat, that’s the problem. TeXLive 2025 on OpenSuse tumbleweed has a bug with that. I guess I’m going to try a manual TeXLive 2024 install and hope it’s not too hard to manage.
@kfjelsted @mastoblind @main Would you be willing to look at what I have so far and see if you can help with fixing errors? I’m getting a lot of “overfull” errors and issues with Biber not running. I’m getting extremely frustrated since this was due last week.
@RareBird15 @mastoblind @main Can you clarify what the environment you have set up and working for Latex that is functioning verses what you are adding/changing? It sounds like there is a lot of layers going on? As far as the late assignment it is always complex to try and build an environment and keep on track for the first use. Is there a way to hire a reader or disability specialist to help get the current assignment done in Power Point and at the same time build an independent accessible environment without trying to intersect the two objectives at this point?
@RareBird15 @mastoblind @main Another thing that we do is have ChatGPT create images and put them on separate slides. That way, we don’t have to worry about the formatting and moving things around and what it looks like.
@RareBird15 @mastoblind @main To get started, you can create a markdown or word file with all of your text. That way the slides will be made for you when you convert it to PowerPoint. You’re heading ones or the slide titles and heading to is the body of your slide. Once you do that, you can convert it to PowerPoint and have the basic presentation and then add your graphics and notes after that.
@DesireeRenae @mastoblind @main Hmm, I’ll have to look into this. I didn’t know you could make presentations with Markdown.
@RareBird15 @DesireeRenae @mastoblind @main Markdown works for standard presentations but it doesn’t cover math or special styles and citations. On the iPhone and Mac there is a presentation app called Deckset which is designed around Markdown which builds the slides automatically but it again doesn’t give the completeness of the Latex ecosystem.
@RareBird15 @mastoblind @main I think you are better off using Latex Beamer and finding a workflow around that such as https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/9462/how-should-i-convert-my-beamer-slides-to-powerpoint-according-to-these-odd-speci
@kfjelsted @mastoblind @main That’s actually what I tried to do at first. I’m using TeXLive 2025 under WSL OpenSuse tumbleweed, but I kept getting errors like "cannot find \begin{document}, even though I could see it in my file.
@RareBird15 @mastoblind @main We have training material for PowerPoint if you would like to learn the program in more detail: https://www.nvaccess.org/product/microsoft-powerpoint-with-nvda-ebook/ It should be possible to create a presentation including graphics and speaker notes. Which version of PowerPoint are you using?
