Best Sharing Practices

The best way to share your accessible PowerPoint is as a PowerPoint file (.PPTX). There are very few reasons to ever use PDFs and no reason to share a PowerPoint as a PDF. PDFs are not user-friendly, accessible, and not as secure as you think.

Who benefits from better sharing

PDFs are incredibly difficult and time-consuming to make accessible. Converting an accessible PowerPoint file to PDF may undo all the good work done to make your content inclusive and accessible.

Below are the number of accessibility issues present in a 19-page PDF created from an accessible PowerPoint. On the left, Adobe’s built-in checker shows 20 issues (each of which may have multiple instances throughout the document). On the right, the PDF Accessibility Checker notes 2095 PDF Universal Accessibility standard errors and 2122 Web Content Accessibility Guideline errors. All of these errors require significant time and expert knowledge to fix.

How to fix it

If you feel you absolutely must use a PDF, follow the instructions on making accessible PDFs. Even if your PowerPoint is accessible, the PDF copy may not be. You will need to make your PDF accessible which requires significant time and specialized knowledge. As you already have an accessible PowerPoint, creating a PDF is only extra work which takes hours and causes significant frustration as Acrobat is not a pleasant or intuitive software to work in.

How to prevent it next time

Share your accessible PowerPoint presentation via OneDrive, email, or upload to your learning management system.

If you are concerned about security share a read-only or uneditable version of your PowerPoint.

If you have private notes in your PowerPoint, remove your speaker notes before sharing.