You will spend twenty minutes picking a font for your title slide. You will spend another fifteen agonizing over whether the logo should be top-left or top-right. And then you will hit send on a deck that a screen reader user, a low-vision reviewer, or someone tabbing through with a keyboard cannot actually follow — because nobody ran the one tool built into your software that catches all of this in under ten minutes.
That tool already exists. It ships free with PowerPoint. It's called the Accessibility Checker, and most people who make decks for a living have never clicked it. This isn't a redesign project. It's a pre-flight check, and it belongs right next to your spell-check pass, right before you hit "share" ahead of a client call.
The Stat: Microsoft's own documentation for the PowerPoint Accessibility Checker names the exact issue types it scans for — alt text, reading order, color contrast, and slide titles are called out specifically as checked rules, not vague suggestions. (Source: Microsoft)
Why your deck is probably failing right now
Nobody sets out to build an inaccessible pitch deck. It happens by accident, one habit at a time:
- You drag a screenshot of a chart onto a slide and never give it a description, so a screen reader announces it as "picture" and nothing else.
- You drop a text box wherever it looks good, instead of using the placeholder layout, which means the underlying structure — the order a screen reader will actually read things in — has no relationship to the order a sighted person sees them in.
- You pick a "premium" dark navy background with light-gray body text because it looks sleek in the deck, and it fails contrast the second someone views it on a projector or a phone in daylight.
- Every slide is labeled "Slide 2," "Slide 3," and so on in the outline, because you never bothered to give it a real title.
Every one of these is a five-second fix once you know it's a problem. The issue is that none of them are visible unless you go looking — which is exactly what the built-in checker does for you.
The actual 10-minute walkthrough
1. Run the checker first (2 minutes)
In PowerPoint, go to Review > Check Accessibility. It opens a pane that lists every error, warning, and tip in your deck, slide by slide, in plain language — no guessing which slide has a problem. Microsoft's Accessibility Checker rules for PowerPoint lay out exactly what triggers each category, so you know whether something is a must-fix or a nice-to-have before you touch anything.
Do this before you start cleaning up anything else. It'll tell you precisely which of the remaining steps actually apply to your deck.
2. Add real alt text to charts and images (3 minutes)
Right-click any image, chart, or screenshot and choose Edit Alt Text. Skip the "decorative" checkbox unless the image genuinely carries no information (a background texture, a divider line). For a chart, describe the takeaway, not just the chart type — "Bar chart showing Q3 revenue up 22% over Q2" beats "chart of revenue" every time. If you inherited slides from someone else, this is almost always the single most common gap.
3. Fix the reading order (2 minutes)
Use Home > Arrange > Reading Order Pane to see the actual sequence a screen reader will follow on that slide. If your title, then a callout box, then a chart, then a footnote don't read in a logical sequence, drag them into the right order in the pane. This is invisible to you visually — the slide looks fine — but it can make a slide read completely backwards for anyone using assistive tech.
4. Stop free-floating text boxes; use slide layouts (1 minute per offending slide)
Text typed into a plain text box you drew yourself often isn't recognized as a proper placeholder, which breaks both the reading order and the outline view. Use Home > Layout to pick a built-in structure, then type into the existing placeholders instead of drawing new boxes on top. It looks identical on screen. It's structurally a completely different, more accessible object underneath.
5. Check contrast, especially on the title slide (1 minute)
Title slides are where brand ambition tends to override legibility — a stylized logo color as the text color on a dark hero image is a classic failure. The Accessibility Checker flags insufficient contrast, but it's worth a manual look at your title and section-header slides specifically, since those are usually the most heavily "designed" and the most likely to break the rule everywhere else in the deck follows.
6. Give every slide a real title (1 minute)
Even if you hide the title placeholder visually, it should contain descriptive text — this is what populates the navigable outline for screen reader users jumping between slides, similar to how heading levels work on a webpage. "Slide 4" tells a screen reader user nothing. "Q3 Regional Performance" tells them exactly where they are.
What if you're in Google Slides?
Google Slides doesn't ship an equivalent one-click checker the way PowerPoint does, which means the discipline has to be manual — but every principle above still applies. Add descriptive alt text to images via the right-click menu, use the built-in layout options instead of free-floating text boxes, and check contrast by eye or with an external contrast tool before you present. WebAIM's guide to accessible PowerPoint is written for PowerPoint specifically but the underlying techniques — alt text, structure, contrast, logical order — translate directly to Slides, Keynote, or any other tool you're using to build a deck.
Quick reference: where each issue actually lives
| Issue type | Where it usually hides | Fix location |
|---|---|---|
| Missing alt text | Charts, screenshots, logos | Right-click → Edit Alt Text |
| Reading order chaos | Slides with layered text boxes | Home → Arrange → Reading Order Pane |
| Low contrast | Title slides, section dividers | Home → Layout, then check colors manually |
| Generic slide titles | Every slide's outline entry | Slide title placeholder (can be visually hidden) |
| Free-floating text boxes | Slides copied from other decks | Home → Layout → pick a built-in layout |
These same ideas — meaningful text alternatives, sensible structure, sufficient contrast — are the foundation of the broader Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that W3C WAI maintains for the web at large. A pitch deck isn't a webpage, but the reasoning behind why these things matter is identical: someone on the other end of that content needs it to actually make sense without relying on how it looks.
The ten minutes are the easy part
The hardest part of accessible presentations isn't the fixes — it's remembering to run the checker at all before you hit send. Put it in your pre-call ritual next to charging your laptop and testing your mic. Ten minutes, once, before a deck goes out the door, is a much better trade than finding out live on a call that half your slides don't make sense to someone in the room.
And presentations aren't the only thing worth checking before a client call. If the deck links back to your site, or the follow-up email points them there, it's worth knowing what they'll find. You can get a free scan of your website in about the same time it takes to run that PowerPoint checker — so nothing you send this week is the thing that quietly loses you the account.