The Accessible Design with Adobe Express PowerPoint is designed to be a small tutorial on some key Adobe Express features like templates and brands as well as customization options like fonts, font colors, photos, and shapes. Further, this PowerPoint gives students pointers on how to simultaneously make their design choices accessible and aesthetically pleasing. The PowerPoint features screenshots from the design process of the Five Principles of Accessible Design infographic in order to demonstrate and visualize these steps for students. The infographic and PowerPoint can be used to give a brief introduction to visual rhetoric and digital accessibility in a variety of composition classrooms.
While I used accessibility principles in designing the presentation, I did not cover PowerPoint-specific accessibility features that I could cover in later iterations of accessibility or multimedia design instruction. PowerPoint software has a built-in accessibility checker with a high level of rigor to make presentations that are accessible to audiences with a wide variety of abilities.
Further, I have not run the PDF of the infographic through Adobe Acrobat’s accessibility checker, and that will need to be done as another step in the process of making this collection of materials more accessible.
Finally, I used Huntsman and Cagle’s series of accessibility user guides from the 2022 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing Virtual Conference to inform this pedagogy.
Ash Mayes 