So, the blog this week is on the topic of making narrated PowerPoints more accessible. It may as well have been titled ‘How I wasted half a day of my life’ because it hasn’t been massively productive.
Let’s start with the problem. In one of the courses that I have been working on, the Aula spaces use a lot of narrated PowerPoints to share recorded content. There were no captions or transcripts as the resources weren’t made by us.
Unsurprisingly we have had some student feedback saying that the narrated PowerPoints were sometimes difficult to follow for someone with hearing difficulties. This has lead us to start thinking about how best to improve the narrated PowerPoint accessibility in Aula and what should be best practice in such circumstances.
Firstly, what options are there for making improvements? After some conversations, we came up with the following:
- Write instructions for how people can make downloaded presentations more accessible.
- Save PowerPoint files as videos and then use the Streams/PEStream functionality to add captions.
- Save PowerPoints on the OneDrive as PowerPoint shows (PPS) to autoplay with live captions on.
- Save PowerPoint files onto the OneDrive as PowerPoint Shows (PPS) to autoplay with subtitles encoded into the presentation.
Option One
The first option was disregarded as simply giving advice on how users can do workarounds themselves isn’t acceptable in terms of accessibility requirements (Nicola’s educated opinion). We will be producing some general guidance though as an add on for people which may be a helpful addition to the tools and tech section.
Option Two
The second option has the advantage that we know it works. You can easily save a PowerPoint file as an Mpeg or Mov. Things to check include:
- Each audio file is set to autoplay (select the audio and the ‘playback’ tab to find the option).
- The options to play Narrations and use timings are set in the Slide Show tab.
- The transition times are automatic with a timing equal to the length of each piece of audio.
You can check that this has worked by playing the slide show from the beginning and listening to it play through. It’s then just a case of saving it, uploading it to Streams, downloading the subtitles from Streams and then uploading the file and subtitles into PEStream as per these instructions.
The problem here is one of management as if you want to change one piece of audio or one slide you will have to go through the entire process again.
Option Three
Trying to make it easier to alter made us think about the final two options which would leverage the functionalities present within PowerPoint to create accessible content. First, I tried to create what is known as a ‘show’. This is a version of the presentation that autoplays and should also be write protected. My question was can I set this up to autoplay with live captioning on. This is where the problems start.
I first tried this on my mac which has the most up to date version of the app. I was able to tell it to always play subtitles and then save it as a PPS file. This saved and when opened it starts straight away with the audio and uses the mic to send the playing audio to the cloud for live captioning. Pretty cool. Only problem here is that if you speak then this also gets captioned.
However when I uploaded this to the OneDrive and tried to play the PPS file from there it went straight into the editor window. Also, when I played it from the slide show it didn’t start the audio properly without me moving forward and backwards and didn’t progress slides. Not the desired result.
So, if you have the most up to date apps on your computer this works but not from the browser. As we can’t assume students will have the most up to date versions this seems a bit of a non-starter at the moment.
Option Four
If live captions don’t appear to work, then what about encoding subtitles into the PowerPoint itself. This obviously has the advantage that you are not relying on the cloud for subtitles and you can make sure they are correct. The good news is that it is possible to add subtitles but you need an addon and it’s a bit of a faff. For instructions on how to add the functionality take a look here.
Once you have the STAMP addon installed you get an additional section in the playback tab where you can add captions. It doesn’t generate them but if the original audio was from a script then this would be easy to add. If you don’t have a script then this mechanism will take time making option two above seem preferable.
Conclusion
We’ve looked at a few different options for adding subtitles to PowerPoints. It was hoped that we could use some of the newer functionality in PowerPoint itself to produce slideshows that were accessible for the students. Unfortunately, it seems that the browser version of the app lets this down a bit. If the browser read PPS files properly then we could autoplay the presentation with either option for subtitles. Without this the students will be viewing the edit screen and will have to play the presentation manually which appears to be a little glitchy.
For the best results and the easiest for students to view it appears the best option is to record the PowerPoint as an MPEG and then add Subtitles via Streams. As a secondary option you could add a PPS file to be downloaded so that students can play the file on the app with subtitles added or add a standard PPX file with added accessibility such as the ALT text available. Mixing ALT text and narration appears to be a whole different ball game however which will have to wait for another post.
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