Give every slide a unique title

People who are blind, have low vision, or a reading disability rely on slide titles to navigate. For example, by skimming or using a screen reader, they can quickly scan through a list of slide titles and go right to the slide they want. (And if you’ve ever needed to spot-check or spot-edit a presentation a few minutes before going live in front of a class or an audience, and if you used the Outline view to quickly scan the slide titles and contents, you probably silently thanked Microsoft for inventing the outline view…)

Consequently, each slide in an accessible Power Point presentation must have a unique title. This does not mean that each slide must have a large title at the top of each slide; it doesn’t even necessarily mean that the title must be visible on the slide. It just means that each slide has to have a title attached to it, and that title must be different from the titles of all of the other slides in the presentation.

The best way to tell if something is a text box or a title box is to use the Selection Pane. (If you’re not in the habit of keeping the Selection Pane open when creating/editing Power Point presentations, now is a great time to start!)

A title box can be created on a slide in a number of ways:

A new slide can be created from one of the slide templates that contains an actual title box.

A title box can be selected, copied, and pasted from one slide to another.

An existing slide with the desired layout (i.e. one containing a title box) can be duplicated, and the copied title box can be re-purposed with a new title.

A slide format can be “reset” or transposed from one format to another (for example, a slide without a title box can be “reset” into a slide with a new empty title box). Advantageously, existing content on a slide that’s being reset doesn’t disappear — the existing containers remain in exactly the same condition, and the new slide template is superimposed onto it.

The presentation editor can be changed to “Outline View,” and a title can be added by clicking next to the icon for a slide without a title. A cursor will appear, and any text entered will appear in a title box on that slide.