Accessible Presentations

Accessibility and Inclusivity Presentation Guidelines

Podium Paper Presentations:

  1. Colour Scheme of Slides:
    • Choose high contrast colours.
    • Dark background with light text is recommended.
    • In addition to verbally emphasizing information, use bold, italic, underline, or *asterisks*, etc. to convey emphasis.
    • For further information, see Colour Contrast Guidelines and Evaluation Tools
  1. Text of Slides:
    • Keep text on your slides to a minimum.
    • Use large sans serif fonts. Popular sans serif fonts include Arial, Helvetica, Avant Garde, and Geneva.
    • Title fonts should be 44 pt. or greater. Text fonts should be 36 pt. or greater.
    • Put no more than 6 lines of text per slide (excluding columns).
  2. Audio Describe All Visual Information:
    • Verbally describe ALL visuals on your slides.
    • Ensure descriptions are meaningful (e.g. rather than ‘I went on a great vacation’, say ‘the  photo on this slide features myself and my children building a sandcastle on our vacation to the beach’).
    • Describe all graphics and charts/graphs.
    • Describe and caption ALL videos.
    • Describe other visual information in your presentation (e.g. if you ask audience to use the thumbs up feature to indicate a response to your question, say ‘about half of you agree with that statement’).
    • Avoid using animations in your presentation.
  3. How to Speak Your Presentation:
    • During your presentation, speak at a proper cadence – do not speak too fast.
    • Make sure your face and mouth are visible to enable lip reading (make sure you are not backlit).
    • Use understandable terms – avoid slang/colloquialisms.
    • Use a microphone when provided (even if the room is small or you think you can project well); speak directly into the microphone
  1. Supporting Materials
    • Consider preparing several large print copies of your presentation and offering them to any audience members who are interested
    • Since presentations must be in English, you may wish to prepare a version of your presentation in a second language that is relevant to your topic and bring several copies to share with audience members who are interested

Poster Presentations:

  1. Colour Scheme:
    • Choose high contrast colours; we generally recommend using a light coloured background and darker coloured fonts and graphics
    • Avoid using patterns, gradients or images as backgrounds, as these can make the poster more difficult to read. 
    • Use bold, italic, underline, or *astrices*, etc. to convey emphasis.
    • For further information, see these Colour Contrast Guidelines and Evaluation Tools
  2. Text:
    • Keep text content simple and concise
  • Use large sans serif fonts on plain backgrounds. Popular sans serif fonts include Arial, Helvetica, Avant Garde, and Geneva.
  • Title fonts should be 44 pt. or greater. Text fonts should be 36 pt. or greater.
  1. Images
  • Keep graphics and tables simple; avoid small detail
  • Provide adequate white space, avoid clutter, and visually highlight sections with borders, colored headings, and white space
  1. Oral presentation/defense
    • Refer to guidelines under Podium Paper Presentation regarding tips for speaking and audio describing 
    • You may consider preparing an audio file description to your poster and linking it to your poster using a QR code

Dialogic Sessions:

  1. Please refer to all guidelines under Podium Paper Presentations.
  2. If you plan to rearrange the room setup for your session, make sure the space is accessible to participants using mobility aids and those who navigate with less sight.
  3. Plan to always use the microphone provided for all participants when moderating discussions; although people often believe they can project, this is not accessible for some participants.

Additional Resources:

Further helpful resources for creating a more broadly inclusive presentation include: