Have you ever been asked to find a technology solution for *flailing-arms-make-it-better*?!? Or attempted requirements gathering only to get a detailed explanation of how to do a task in the current system?
As anyone who has done requirements gathering can tell you, it’s a bit of an art form. (Yes, pun intended in the title!)
You want to meet the needs of the people who will use the solution, but it can be challenging to understand the needs of people who may not know how to articulate them in ways that translate well to technical specifications. While business process mapping is not an uncommon part of requirements analysis, it can be hard to get started if you’re new to it and hard to know how to get the necessary information.
This session I presented at the 2023 Nonprofit Technology Conference will break down ways to map workflows and get the information you need to write up effective requirements.
Apologies if you came here expecting that I was a playground designer, although there are people who make accessible play areas!
Are you typically creating slides that you’ll present online? In person? (This photo was taken before someone else’s presentation at a conference several years ago.)
There is no perfect way to make things 100% accessible to everyone because people are different. I state that upfront as a reminder to myself as much as to anyone else that this work is not perfect, that it is messy, and that none of this should stop us from working to make things more accessible to more people right now.* I do not and I am not going to get everything right. I’m sure I’ve failed on a lot of these points in previous slide decks and I will continue to make mistakes. None of these tips are foolproof, and this list is not exhaustive. Perhaps you’ll read it and say you knew all these things already—and that you have some things to teach me! (Which would be great! Please do.) But, hey, maybe some of this will be new to some people. So, I will continue on with my imperfect notes on how I’ve been trying to make my slides more accessible.
Some of these things I learned from the speaker guide for NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, some from a class in graduate school on making information accessible (taught by the awesome Dr. Renee Hill!), some from independent learning about accessibility, and some things by trial and error.
The context of this post is creating slides that I’m preparing to present, such as for a conference talk, as opposed to other purposes. Although I may sometimes mention things related to presenting, the focus will be on the slides themselves. I most often use PowerPoint, so I mention some specific things in the version of the program I have, so if you have a more recent version or use something else for creating slides, those functions might be called something else or work a little differently.
Here are some things I’ve been learning and working at incorporating in my slides:
Always check the template (and any other colored elements you are choosing) to ensure you have sufficient color contrast. Unfortunately, those default templates are not necessarily accessible – even when they are labeled as such. You’ll want to check things like the color contrast for people who are colorblind or have low vision. If you like to create your own templates, start with a color palette that has sufficient contrast. Of note, color contrast is not only about the colors, but sometimes about the size and font weight. Black text on a white background will work at any legible size, but certain color combinations that are readable at font size 40 will not be readable by everyone at a font size 20. While it’s not perfect, if your combination doesn’t work if printed in grayscale, you should probably adjust the color palette.
Make sure every slide has a title. Occasionally, I will not use the template title area, or because I am not using a template, it is unclear which text is the title of the slide. While it might be obvious to a sighted person, it’s important to make sure someone using a screen reader would be able to use titles to help navigate through the slides. In PowerPoint, if you turn on “Check accessibility,” an Accessibility tab will be added to the ribbon at the top. You use the button for setting the slide title to set a specific text box to be the slide title.
Include an agenda and let people know what point in the presentation they’re at. This is more of a presentation tip, but it’s helpful to orient people to what’s going to be covered and to give people a sense of where they are in the agenda. This can be especially helpful for people with cognitive or learning disabilities, but it’s helpful to everyone. I usually include a slide with a numbered list of the topics or sections, and then each section starts with a section header slide that references the section number and where we are in the presentation. (If it’s hard for me to break it out this way, then it probably means the presentation needs some further organization.)
In this example of a section header slide, the title of the section, “What is service design?” follows “1 / 5” to indicate that this is the first of five sections in the presentation.
Use a font size of at least 18, but preferably larger! Using a larger font size also prevents you from putting too much text per slide, as slide are intended to be presented. If you truly need to write that much, you are writing a report! Or at least an article or blog post. They’re fine formats, but they are formats that meant to be read at your own pace instead of at the speed at which someone is giving a presentation.
IF YOU WRITE IN ALL CAPITALIZED LETTERS FOR VERY LONG PORTIONS OF TEXT, THIS IS VERY DIFFICULT FOR EVERYONE TO READ. That took you an extra moment to read and comprehend, didn’t it?
Leave the bottom 20% of the slide blank so that captions won’t cover up any content. Occasionally you might be presenting within a platform where the captions are not on top of the slides, but if you’re not sure, the bottom is often where captions are placed on a screen. (Unsure if there will be captions? Ask! It doesn’t matter whether you personally need them. Other speakers and attendees might, and they shouldn’t have to ask.)
Include alternative text for images, videos, diagrams, and other visual elements that are relevant. Avoid text in images; simply use the text. (This is inaccessible both to people using screen readers and to people using translation software or other text-based tools.) For videos, you’ll need to consider both captions and video descriptions (a description of what is happening visually) so that the content is accessible to audience members who are blind or D/deaf. You can mark decorative images as decorative and skip the alt text, although it’s worth asking the question of what those images are adding to your presentation.
Plan to describe the images verbally if they’re relevant. Okay this isn’t about the slides, but during the presentation, make sure you verbally describe the visual elements that you created alternative text for. Or if you are demonstrating something live, then describe what you’re doing – like if you were on a cooking show.
Speaker descriptions: Some people say the speakers should describe themselves, and others say this isn’t really useful information. Within the blind community, there are a lot of differing opinions on speaker descriptions. Unless I’m asked to describe myself visually, I tend to use the guideline of whether it is relevant. If the topic is related to career development, then the fact that I am an Asian American woman in my mid-30s is relevant. If I am talking about working remotely, then it makes sense to reference my surroundings. If I am showing people how to create diagrams, then a description of my visual appearance and what sighted people can see in my background feels performative rather than adding anything to an understanding of the topic.
Review the order of object order on your slides. If someone is using a device like a screen reader, you’ll want them to go through everything on your slides in the correct order. An easy way to test this is to use the Tab key to tab through each object (title, text box, image, etc.) on each slide. You can usually right click to move an object forward or backward. (Reading order starts in the back and moves forward to end in the front.)
My process for creating slides
Sometimes it’s difficult to take a collection of tips and figure out how to apply them in practice. My process for creating slides and presentations may be different from yours, but here’s a rough summary of my current process:
Draft learning objectives, usually as a document.
Use the learning objectives to draft an outline, usually in the same document.
Start a new slide file and pick a template.
Check that the template color contrast is sufficient. (Turn on accessibility checker to help me with this if it’s available.)
Edit the template if needed.
Start building out the content in the slides – usually putting the bullet points from the outline as the temporary slide titles.
Work on developing the text and the speaking points in whatever order I can get it to come out in. Usually I put in placeholders for visuals that I need, but also sometimes information that I need to go find. I typically turn off or ignore the accessibility checker during this part.
Lots of iterating, editing, filling in those placeholders, refining speaking points.
Once the visual elements are finalized, I write alternative text. (I usually turn the accessibility back on at this point because it helps me tick off images that need alt text.)
If I forgot to describe something in the speaking points, then I incorporate the description of visuals.
Review and address any other accessibility issues that come up – with the exception of slide order, which I leave until last in case I need to make other changes.
Go through the presentation as a whole, both the slides and practicing the speaking, to make sure everything works together as a whole (and within the allotted time).
Check the slide order by tabbing through each object on each slide and adjusting the object order as needed.
If there’s a method for making the slides available to attendees ahead of the presentation (so they can review as needed, at their own pace, using the appropriate tools, ahead of time), then I do that.
What else? I’m open to learning how to do things better!Email me and let me know if you learned anything new from this post, have suggestions, or what your process looks like for creating slides.
Have you ever been in a workshop or meeting where you’re handed a pile of sticky notes and a marker?
Did you ever wonder why you couldn’t simply use a pen? Or why can’t you write your ideas directly on the whiteboard?
It is true, that it will be easier to see things written in marker than in pen, especially if you’re looking at them from a standing-in-front-of-a-wall distance rather than a reading-a-piece-of-paper-on-your-desk distance. It is also true that the sticky notes allow you to move the ideas around more easily and arrange them in different configurations.
What else?
Sticky notes are usually small squares or rectangles. They automatically set some limits on how much you can write on there – especially if you’re writing in marker. It encourages you to break your thoughts and ideas into smaller units that can then be easily arranged and sorted and combined in various ways.
Writing in a small space with marker forces you to be more succinct. You’re more likely to put down a bullet point or a phrase or a word rather than a complete, composed sentence. Even on a letter sized sheet of paper, when you write with marker, it is more likely that you’ll write something like headlines or bullet points than an essay. You can write headlines or bullet points on a sheet of paper using a pen, true. However, the narrower point and more precise line that results also tends to encourage that we work to perfect what we write with a pen. Consider even the difference between how you write when using pen and paper vs. typing.
Combined, sticky notes and markers encourage a rapid fire of ideas, balancing the constraint of space with the fuzziness of using a less precise medium. While digital whiteboards and sticky notes where you can change the font size can be very convenient, the benefits of a particular form can get lost.
Next time you’re having trouble getting started on a new project or getting stuck trying to solve a problem, try using a different medium to work on it.
Even if you haven’t done marketing and communications work, I bet that you’ve felt that magnetic pull of an image – especially on those sites and apps with infinite scroll and where the supply of cute animal photos (and now videos) feels endless. We’ve all felt the power of an image that compelled us to click to see more, understood stories that told only in photos, and most of us have probably also fretted about what photo to use when sharing certain things on social media. (Don’t worry, I fretted plenty over what photo to use for a post about the power of sharing photos!)
The St. Mary’s River at the tail end of sunset, the sky pastel pink and yellow and purple and reflected in the calm water — I spent many many evenings and nights walking by the St. Mary’s River during college (at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a.k.a. the best St. Mary’s!) because I love, love, loved watching the sunset in the water, the jewel tones at dusk, and the lights that shined across the river at night, and the sound of the water gently lapping. Even just seeing it now brings back lots of fond memories of long walks with friends and the types of conversations it seems that you can only really have late at night.
As a writer, it may not be surprising that when it comes to social media, I mostly use words. However, I’ve really come to love sharing photos one on one. With my parents, we often share pictures of what we’re eating and meals we’ve cooked. My friends share photos of their pets and kids and gardens and bathroom renovations. I’ll send a friend a picture of something I saw in a store that I know they would have liked or gotten a kick out of. I’ll send the pet lovers photos of the cat. One of the sweetest birthday presents I ever received was a video of my niece and nephew singing happy birthday to me, while I was half a world away.
Why does it feel so different than if I had seen the photo on social media, instead of in a message sent directly to me? Isn’t social media still a way of sharing what’s going on in our lives or what we’re experiencing with friends and family?
Several years ago, I took a course on knowledge management where they had a number of really wonderful guest lecturers (I learned so much! Thanks, Tara and Piers!). And one day, there were two people from an NGO I have unfortunately forgotten the name of, but they basically did work around storytelling and public health and helping organizations get better at storytelling to get their messages across. And they had us all do an activity: We were paired up and then told to find a photo on our phone and share it with our partner and tell them about it.
The magic that lit up that room. Everyone was abuzz and they had to really get our attention to wrap up the activity. Although the speakers were showing us the power of photos in terms of storytelling, here’s what I remember.
I remember how a group of us who had just met a couple days ago were now telling a near stranger about our favorite places, about how proud we were of our kids, about life changing trips, about loved ones who maybe were no longer with us. In the span of a few minutes.
I remember that the room felt warmer. That I felt looser and more grounded at the same time. That while we had all been sharing, the space felt alive.
Because we were building relationships with each other – with the person sitting next to us. Even if one person was showing the photo and telling the story at a time, it was still a two-way street. The other person made eye contact, nodded, smiled, made verbal acknowledgements, and/or asked questions.
And that’s the thing that gets missed sometimes in social media. Don’t get me wrong – there can certainly be a power to sharing our stories and letting people in when we say, post a photo or even a written story on a social media site. Obviously, I would not write blog posts if I did not believe there was also value in sharing things with a wide audience. There’s a place for that and it is needed.
But sharing a photo with one person (or even one small group of people) directly is a way to connect, to build relationships, to let people in—to say, “I choose you to share this with.”
There’s a conversation you can have in that space that you have created with the other person that you can’t have with an audience because you can each be equal participants. The other person can contribute to the conversation and move it to another place – beyond simply responding to what you had posted or shared (though they can do that, too). It’s easy for social media posts to get performative without necessarily intending for them to. But in a conversation with another person, it’s not about metrics.
When I worked in offices, I tried to make a point of acknowledging people when I or they walked in. Maybe it was a hello or head nod or a slight rap on the top of their cubicle wall as I went by. Because all of us, we need to feel seen, too. Feeling seen is different from being seen.
And that’s why conversations will never be replaced by posting and publishing.
So I say…in this blog post…which I am publishing. But if you want to talk, or have a photo to share, you can always drop me a line so we can have a conversation.
Struggle with the challenge of creating a great experience for your program participants or donors while balancing the needs of staff or volunteers or your organization? Trying to develop a new program, new event, new campaign, new operational capacity – and feel like you’re constantly discovering another missing piece you didn’t have in place?
Service design considers the needs of all stakeholders involved in a service or experience, how to create value both for the user and the provider, and all of the supporting infrastructure or processes needed to make that happen.
In this 30-minute talk from the 2022 Nonprofit Technology Conference, I provide an overview of service design and introduce a core method, the service blueprint, as a way to help you think through and plan what’s needed to deliver the experiences or outcomes you’re hoping to achieve for new and for existing programs.
When I was a kid, I drew all the time. On anything. (Just ask my parents to move their couch—there is still crayon on that wall behind it!) While I have no plans to become a professional artist or graphic designer, I’ve carried drawing and sketching into adulthood, and into my work.
How, you wonder?
Have you ever had a conversation with someone, perhaps multiple people in a meeting, and then realized halfway through there were actually multiple conversations going on? As in, none of you were talking about the same thing, even if you were using the same words and convinced that you were?
The best way to get everyone on the same page is to take it literally.
Drawing a picture is the best way to get everyone on the same page. The challenge of discussing things that aren’t tangible, like a process or where all our data lives, is that everyone is working off of how they think things are related in their brain. Which is not to say that each person’s version isn’t each true, but it’s hard to tell if they line up with everyone else’s or not. Without anything tangible, we often assume that everyone else has access to the same information we do and that they’re seeing the same image of the thing in their head that we are.
Putting it down on paper (or a whiteboard, or an online canvas) for everyone to see at the same time, however, allows people to see where things don’t match up, fill in some gaps, and make corrections. Most importantly, it’s a prop that helps us make sure we’re all having a conversation about the same thing and know that everyone else is looking at the same thing.
Wait, but I can’t draw!
You doth protest too much. If you can draw a box and a line, you can draw a diagram. When you’re using visual communication, it doesn’t matter how it looks as long as people understand it. You’re not creating a pretty picture; you’re creating clarity.
Interested in learning more? Here’s a talk I gave, along with Adrienne Figus and Brianna Collins, at the 2022 Nonprofit Technology Conference with on how you can draw a map to clarity:
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