Insights from an accessibility action hero: Stephy Hogan

Accessibility often ends up being an afterthought in content creation, but we’ve been thinking for a long time about how it can become part of your foundation when you’re creating presentations – or any other content – using PowerPoint. We’ve been talking to presentation guru, PowerPoint MVP, and anime fan extraordinaire Stephy Hogan. She, like us, believes accessibility is a fundamental part of content creation, and has just released an exciting [free!] tool to help make accessibility more… accessible.

Hannah Harper: So Stephy, first of all, who are you?

Stephy Hogan: I’m a presentation designer and user experience designer. I got here via a very long and winding path, which I think is what a lot of presentation designers end up doing. I was going to be an academic, but that didn’t end up working out and I somehow fell into graphic design world from a non-profit. After that I worked for a retirement plan services company and it was all finance, all kinds of presentations, with all the charts and all the data, and besides some print design, I was working on PowerPoints.

I’ve always been focused on how the end-user interacts with whatever I make, and you can imagine in a financial services firm, how engaging a lot of those presentations are, right? Not so much. So that’s when I started getting into the whole idea of storytelling in presentations and how we can pull out the story from the data.

Hannah: What three tips would you give to content creators about approaching presentations from a storytelling perspective?

Stephy: You, the person making the presentation or the person presenting the presentation, you’re not the audience. Your content has to connect to them and resonate with them. People are time-poor, they zone out, they’re multitasking. But people are also wired for storytelling. If they can get invested in a story, you get them hooked.

Next, you have to figure out a way to make what you’re saying personal to the audience. There’s always a way to tell a story, even with a bunch of data. Look for cause and effect. What made it this way? Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and ask ‘what’s going to happen to me because of this?’ Make it personal.

Finally, stories don’t have to be long. There’s always going to be a way to convey information in a simple, straightforward manner that is personal and connects with the audience. Nobody’s ever complained that a presentation that they sat through was too short, right?

Hannah: So I want to pivot to PowerPoint. What do you love most about PowerPoint?

Stephy: I love that it’s so robust. You can make gorgeous animations that look like they were done in After Effects or you can do gorgeous typography like you were in Illustrator all day, but it’s a tool that so many more people have access to.

Hannah: You’re passionate about accessibility. Where did that come from?

Stephy: It’s so funny because nobody likes doing the accessibility stuff: it’s extra work and you have to put more thought into it. It started in 2019 when I was working at a new job and they had this really funky brand palette. It was lime green on dark  green, and when they projected it, the lime accent didn’t show up. You saw this hazy light green thing, but you couldn’t tell that it was words. And I put up with it like everybody else did, but then a friend of mine that I worked with came and said, ‘I’m colour blind. Can you please do something about this!?’ And that started me thinking more deeply about accessibility.

And then what got me into the whole cognitive side of accessibility was COVID. During COVID, you know the kids are at home doing school and they were required to be on camera in front of their computers. You’re a tween sitting in front of a computer and all of your classmates are staring at you: it’s a big difference between that and sitting in the class itself and only looking at the teacher. And that got me thinking that there’s got to be a better way to handle this, to make this experience more accessible.

Hannah: Right. So you’ve made a thing and it’s super cool. Tell us about it.

Stephy: It all started when I had this government healthcare event. It was about nine presentations full of all these diagrams and charts. So that was hundreds of objects that needed alt text on them.
And I thought wouldn’t it be cool if I could hit a button and it would export all of these objects into a spreadsheet? It would tell me what the images were like, show the thumbnail the images, tell me where they were in the presentation, and then have a cell for alt text next to it. It would be the kind of thing you can even share with a presenter or subject matter expert to add that detail in for you. Then I could hit a button and import it and it would just put all the alt text in the presentation for me.

So I threw the bat signal up to Jamie and said ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’ and the thing that that he helped me bring into the world is the Alt-O-Matic.

It even works if I import the file after one of the objects moves and/or changes slide position.

Hannah: That’s super cool. How do you get it?

Stephy: It’s free. You can download it from my website. (Here’s a link to get it).

Hannah: Why did you decide to give it away for free?

Stephy: When it comes to accessibility there’s a lot of stuff I could charge for, but that’s just another barrier to keep people from doing it. Not only does it make the lives better for people who need alt text, but think about all of the presentation designers who go through the pain of having to add it all in. I just want to reduce the pain for all of us having to build these things.

Hannah: Is there anything on your wish list when it comes to accessibility in PowerPoint?

Stephy: Yes, there is one huge sticking point that really makes burns my biscuits! Colour contrast. I have text in a text box and the slide itself is dark blue and my text is this mid blue. I can see that that text is really hard to read, but it’s not going to be flagged in the accessibility checker because PowerPoint can only calculate the contrast between the colour of the text and the fill colour of the text box. It would be great if Microsoft could fix that.

(We agree with Stephy that this is a very annoying problem to solve. We have a work-around using our free tool BrightSlide. You can run a colour contrast report and exclude any poor combinations from your brand guidelines.)

Hannah: Can you give presentation designers one tip when it comes to accessibility?

Stephy: Start with one thing. Start by checking for one specific thing every time you do a presentation. It could be colour contrast. It could be the position of your title, so check your title placeholders haven’t nudged a couple of pixels from slide to slide because movement is distraction, and distraction doesn’t help audience members with ADHD for example. Once that becomes second nature, pick up another thing, and then soon you’ll have a whole bunch of things that are ingrained in your workflow. Don’t take everything on at once because it’s really overwhelming.

Hannah: Do you have any other resources when it comes to accessibility?

Stephy: I have a reference deck that helps with accessibility. The WCAG guidelines are so dry and there’s so much to absorb so I tried to make it easier. It’s called the S.C.H.I.T deck which stands for Sight. Cognition. Hearing. Interaction. Technology. And it’s designed to make the WCAG guidelines more accessible, ironically.

It’ll explains the actual guideline and what kind of people it helps. And then it has tips for designers, developers, and writers, and then what it applies to, so web, digital, presentations – that sort of thing.

Hannah: Any other recommendations?

Stephy: Nolan Haims has the Better Deck Deck, and that’s really great because it gives you different ways to present information – good alternatives to bullet points.

John Schwabish’s books on data visualization are amazing because they go through different types of charts and when to use them.

Oh, and for the template nerds, of course Julie Terberg and Echo Swinford’s book. That thing is well-worn in our house!

Hannah: Okay, and finally if you could take one piece of PowerPoint functionality and make it your superpower, what would it be?

Stephy: If each of my fingers had one of the align or distribute button functionalities that would be amazing! Think of cleaning your house. Align and distribute, and maybe an undo?

Hannah: I feel like every superhero needs a ctrl or cmd Z option.