At a conference I attend fairly often, a bingo card normally circulates on social media of terrible aspects of academic presentations, and everyone tries to witness all of these before the conference is out. Think “uses yellow text on a white background”, “font size less than 10pt in a 1000+ capacity lecture theatre” etc. To this day, I’m not sure what the winner gets – massive amount of prestige? Free drinks? Who knows.
For those of us who can view presentations effectively even when they’re incredibly poorly thought out, this might seem like fun. It certainly adds something that might keep you awake on day 4 of 5 when you’re running on very little sleep and in a cosy lecture theatre just after lunch. Or you’re in a lecture that doesn’t match any of your interests and you want something to do whilst you wait for one that does. However, it represents something more – poor practice, and the prevalence of such poor practice, as many of the items on that bingo card were ultimately inaccessible and exclusionary approaches to scientific communication.
After recently being reminded of this, I thought it might be useful to write a post on how to avoid such traps.
We all present our data in lots of different ways, and as technology develops and the online landscape changes, particularly post-pandemic, the need for flexibility in how we do so is ever more pertinent. However, the core ways in which we can make our presentations more accessible are similar, irrespective of the medium in which they are presented:
- Use an accessible font. Sometimes the serif versus sans-serif debate runs riot here, and it seems to be true that sans-serif fonts are better for people with dyslexia (and italics decrease readability for the same group). However, the readability of a font can change based on the context, background, colour and multiple other aspects, with some being more suitable for digital and others more suited to print. Style can of course play a part too, but there are so many options that it is a world in which you don’t need to forfeit accessibility for style or vice-versa. The British Dyslexia Association provides a useful style guide [1].
- Make the language as clear as is possible for the topic. I’m a waffler, I get it, but there’s an art to being concise, and often the more practiced you get at being concise, the clearer you can be and therefore the more accessible you are being.
- Define your jargon. It doesn’t matter if think everyone in the audience should know, they might not. If you don’t do this, you can lose members of your audience very quickly, particularly if that is a bit of jargon on which the entire talk rests.
- Make sure your colours are well-thought out. High-contrast is great, high-contrast in a colour-blind or colour-vision deficient friendly palette is even better. This can be tricky to balance, particularly with the different requirements of different types of colour blindness, including protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia, but there is a lot of guidance online. One very common accessibility error that is made by scientists particularly is the use of rainbow/jet colour palettes which, unhelpfully, are what many softwares use as their default. A smooth colour gradient is incredibly helpful for both displaying the general “truth” of the data without distorting it in any way, and several such colour schemes (for example, batlow a colour scheme [2] which, anecdotally, I adore so much outside of science that I am using it for a quilt I’m making) are also colour-blind friendly. Not to mention that not using a smooth gradient leads to misrepresentations and distortions of the very data and findings that are so critical to our work and its future influence.
- Use a consistent design. This seems obvious, but if the aforementioned bingo card tells me nothing else, it’s that the simple scaffold of an academic presentation can get lost, whatever the format. Consistency is particularly important for people who use screen readers.
- Caption, caption, caption. Caption your videos and provide transcriptions for those who are hard of hearing or may require both audio and visual input as English is not their first language (or for many different other reasons). Provide image captioning and alternative text for your images and charts so that content is still available to those who use devices such as screen readers.
- Signposting for easy navigation. Not only is it easier for viewers of your presentation to follow what is going on if you use clear headings and subheadings, screenreader software also uses these to help navigation. Keyboard shortcuts within your presentation should also work properly.
- Consider your animations and transitions. Listen, I like a good bouncing animation as much as the next person who plays this specific game of bingo, but it isn’t the most accessible of choices. It is distracting and draws attention from the information you’re intending to convey. Transitioning automatically between your slides, or doing so on a timer and having to flip back to where you were will also distract your audience and is better avoided where possible.
- Think about the laser pointer. This isn’t an easily-solved scenario, as sometimes the only laser pointers allowed in a given context are red, and they can be difficult for people with different types of colourblindness to see. When designing a presentation you should be mindful of signposts you might be able to use alternatively to direct people where needed.
- Test how accessible your presentation is. Accessibility checkers may be integrated with programs such as PowerPoint, and can provide feedback on various aspects of accessibility, including how well your presentation be navigated using screen readers.
- Be open to being flexible. When it isn’t possible to make your presentation, in whatever format, totally accessible, it may be contextually appropriate to find out more about your audience beforehand and determine if there are known modifications that should be made. These could alternatively be made opt-in – some of them may be easier to provide in a specific version of your presentation, e.g. image captioning that is delivered out loud may be distracting and unexpected to those who don’t require it. If doing this, always provide such a version beforehand, rather than after, so the individual has a chance to preview the material. It can also be useful to provide a presentation in a different format, for example a plain-text handout of poster content.
The best science communication is science communication that is truly as inclusive as possible to as many people as possible. This is just an introduction to key aspects of presentations to consider, and is by no means exhaustive, but will hopefully provide you with starting points from which to further consider your own presentations.
Jodi Watt
Author
Dr Jodi Watt [3] is a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Glasgow. Jodi’s academic interests are in both healthy ageing and neurodegenerative diseases of older age, and they are currently working on drug repurposing for dementia. Previously they worked on understanding structural, metabolic and physiological brain changes with age, as measured using magnetic resonance imaging. As a queer and neurodiverse person, Jodi is also incredibly interested in improving diversity and inclusion practices both within and outside of the academic context.
