Accessible PowerPoint slides: titles, reading order and captions

Updated October 23, 2026. A 9 minute read.

Fig. 1A slide open on a laptop with its title bar ringed in orange

A six-slide deck in Outline view, as it was built

View > Outline View

Slide 1Catering menu 2026Typed into the title placeholder. Nothing to fix.
Slide 2No titleThe heading was a text box drawn over the layout, so the slide has no title. Fixed with Set as Slide Title.
Slide 3PricesTwo slides, one title: in a list they sound the same.
Slide 4PricesThe second of the pair. Nothing in the title tells them apart.
Slide 5No titleThe heading was lettering inside a photo. Fixed with Add Hidden Slide Title, and the words said aloud.
Slide 6Questions?Unique, but it tells a listener nothing.

As built: 2 slides with no title, 2 sharing one title, and 1 title that says nothing.

Slide titles are how a screen reader user moves through a deck, and Outline view is the quickest way to see them all at once. A slide with nothing beside its number has no title, whatever its biggest text says.

Start from a layout, and give every slide its own title

People search for "ADA compliant PowerPoint", but no one certifies a deck. What a reviewer checks is whether the slides meet WCAG, and most of that is decided by how each slide was built. Start every slide from a built-in layout (Home > Layout, then Title and Content or another layout with a title). Microsoft's accessibility guide for PowerPoint says those layouts are designed so the order a screen reader reads matches the order a sighted reader sees. If a slide has been pulled apart, Home > Reset puts its placeholders back. For a fresh start, File > New and a search for "accessible templates" brings up Microsoft's own.

Fixing titles from the Accessibility ribbon

Review > Check Accessibility opens an Accessibility ribbon with a Slide Title menu. Its four choices cover every case in the outline above:

Set as Slide Title turns a text box you drew into the real title.
Add Slide Title adds a title placeholder to a slide that has none.
Add Hidden Slide Title places a title just off the slide: invisible in the slide show, still there for navigation. Use it for photo slides and full-bleed charts.
Edit Slide Title jumps to the existing title so you can reword it.

How the checker ranks titles

A slide with no title is an Error in the Accessibility Checker. Two slides with the same title are only a Tip, and easy to skip, yet to someone moving through a list of titles they are the same slide. Fix both. If you group slides into sections, the default names ("Default Section", "Untitled Section") are an Error too.

Line drawing of three slide thumbnails, the middle one ringed in orange — Fig. 2Three slides in a row, the middle one ringed, the way a reader moves from title to title

Reading order: the Reading Order pane

A screen reader does not read a slide top to bottom. In Microsoft's words, it reads the elements in the order they were added to the slide, which might be very different from the order in which they appear. A logo pasted last week, a caption added after the chart and a text box moved to the top all keep their old places in that order. That is 1.3.2 Meaningful Sequence.

Choose Review > Check Accessibility.
Under Warnings, open Check reading order. PowerPoint lists the slides whose order does not match a common layout.
Use the arrow beside a slide and choose Verify object order. The Reading Order pane opens with every object numbered in the order a screen reader will read it.
Drag items into the right order, or use Move Up and Move Down (Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down from the keyboard).
Clear the check box beside a purely decorative item, such as a border, to mark it decorative. Its number disappears and screen readers skip it (Ctrl+Shift+R does the same from the keyboard).

A diagram built from a dozen shapes can be grouped so it is read as one unit with one description. Microsoft adds a caution: animations on the objects are lost when you group them.

To hear it for real, start Narrator with Ctrl+Windows logo key+Enter, press F6 until the slide area has focus, and Tab through the objects. More on that test in screen reader testing for owners.

Alt text on slides: what is different from Word

Alt text and Mark as decorative work exactly as they do in Word, through the Alt Text pane; the steps and the header-row rule for tables are in how to make a Word document accessible. Slides add three things to watch.

Text boxes and shapes with words in them need no alt text; every other object does, and the Reading Order pane puts a warning sign beside each one still missing it.
PowerPoint writes alt text for photos, stock images and its own icons, but not for charts, SmartArt, screenshots or shapes. Read every generated line, and delete the "Description automatically generated" note it may leave behind.
A chart's alt text should give the point of the chart ("Lunch orders doubled between March and June"), not its colours. A slide that is a screenshot of text needs that text on the slide too (1.4.5 Images of Text). More patterns are in alt text examples.

Colour and contrast, on screen and on a projector

Slide text needs the same 4.5:1 as any other text, or 3:1 at 18 pt (14 pt bold) and above (1.4.3), and lines and bars in a chart need 3:1 against what is next to them (1.4.11 Non-text Contrast). Microsoft's own advice for slides is 18 pt or larger. Measure any pair in the contrast check.

The checker cannot see text over a photo

Microsoft says the Accessibility Checker finds low contrast in shapes, tables and SmartArt with solid colours, but not in text in a transparent text box or placeholder on top of the slide background, and not in charts or other non-text content. White words over a photo, a common failure on slides, pass the checker silently. Measure the lightest part of the photo behind the darkest letters, or put a solid band behind the text.

For colour used as the only signal (green for on track, red for late), Microsoft suggests a quick test on Windows: Start > Settings > Accessibility > Color filters, switch on Grayscale and look through the deck. Anything you can no longer tell apart needs a word or a pattern as well; see use of colour.

Video and audio on a slide

A video on a slide needs captions like any other (1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded)). In PowerPoint for Windows, select the video and choose Playback > Insert Captions > Insert Captions, then pick a WebVTT (.vtt) file; versions from 2411 also take SubRip (.srt) files saved as UTF-8. Microsoft's caption steps exclude online videos, so caption those where they are hosted. What the caption file has to contain is in video caption requirements.

Microsoft's accessibility guide says separate caption files play only in PowerPoint for Windows, while its caption help now describes adding them on a Mac and the web too. If the deck may be opened anywhere else, the safe choice is a video with the captions encoded into it.
Compress Media and Optimize Media Compatibility strip captions out, and so does exporting the deck as a video. Save Media as keeps them.
The checker warns about every video without a caption file, even one with captions already in the picture or one with no speech at all; Microsoft lists that as a limitation, so judge those warnings yourself.
A video whose picture carries information the soundtrack does not say also needs audio description, explained in what is audio description.

Animations, transitions and timing

In a talk, an animation that brings in one point at a time is fine. What WCAG worries about is narrower, and three criteria cover it. Nothing may flash more than three times in any one second (2.3.1); W3C's guidance for speakers adds that some motion can make people ill. Movement that starts on its own, lasts more than five seconds and runs beside other content needs a way to pause it (2.2.2), which matters when a looping deck plays on a screen in a lobby or is embedded on a web page.

Timing is the third (2.2.1 Timing Adjustable). Under Transitions > Timing > Advance Slide, the After box moves the deck on by itself after a set time. For a deck people read on their own, such as a self-running deck or a file you send, a slide that leaves before a slow reader has finished is a time limit they cannot change. For those decks, clear the After box so each slide waits for a click (On Mouse Click).

Speaker notes, and saying what is on the slide

Say all of the information that is on each slide, including text and graphics. (This does not mean that you have to read the slide exactly as it is.)
W3C, Making Events Accessible

The same page warns against "you can read it on the slide". Describe the chart in a sentence as you show it, and say who is in the photo. Send the deck ahead of time to anyone who asks, and to any interpreter or captioner working the session.

Speaker notes are for you. When you send the deck as a PDF, PowerPoint's export publishes the slides, and its listed alternatives under Publish what are comments, handouts and Outline view; detail a reader needs belongs on the slide itself or in the text of the email, not only in your notes.

Live captions on screen help the room. Google Slides can show automatic captions while you present, but W3C says automatically generated captions do not meet user needs or accessibility requirements unless they are confirmed to be fully accurate; for an event that needs them, a human captioner is the reliable choice (see captioning services compared).

Before you present, before you send

Scroll sideways to see both columns.

Eight checks for a slide deck, split by whether you are about to present it or send it
Check	Before you present	Before you send
Slide titles	Say each title as the slide comes up	Every slide has a title, and no two titles match
Reading order	Makes no difference to the room	Verify object order on every slide the checker lists
Pictures and charts	Say what each one shows	Alt text on each, or marked as decorative
Contrast and size	Try the deck on the room's screen; 18 pt or larger	No contrast warnings, and text over photos measured by hand
Video	Captions switched on, sound checked	Captions inserted or encoded, and not stripped by Compress Media
Motion and timing	Nothing flashing; cut motion that adds nothing	Slides advance on click, not only on a timer
Speaker notes	Your prompts only; say aloud what the room needs	Anything a reader needs moved onto the slide or into the email
Format	Deck sent ahead to anyone who asks, and to captioners	The .pptx (or an HTML view) alongside any PDF