Accessibility
Accessible slides start with structure
PowerPoint offers title placeholders, reading order, alt text and an Accessibility Checker. Those tools help, but authors can still place content outside the intended structure. Deckyard starts each slide with fields whose roles are declared by its type. The reading view uses those roles to produce headings, lists and tables. Authors still need to check the content and the result.
What the structure yields
This is generated from the declared field vocabulary rather than written per slide type, so every type is covered - including one your own organisation added - and the output cannot drift away from the definitions.
- A text field with a heading role
- A real heading, in a hierarchy: one h1 for the deck, one h2 per slide.
- A collection whose order carries meaning
- An ordered list. A timeline or a process declares `ordered: true`, so it becomes an <ol> and nothing downstream may reshuffle it.
- A collection whose order is incidental
- An unordered list. Cards and columns are a set, and the projection says so.
- A table field
- A table, with <thead> and <th scope="col"> when the type declares a header row and the author leaves it enabled.
- An image declared as meaningful
- A figure with its alt text, and a caption when there is one.
- An image declared as decorative
- Empty alt and aria-hidden, so assistive technology skips it instead of guessing.
- A field that only configures appearance
- Nothing. Colours, sizes and layout choices are not content and are left out of the document view.
- The per-slide accessibility fields
- An accessibility title and summary announced when the slide becomes active, for the cases the fields cannot infer.
The reading view
Every published deck is also a document
A published deck lives at its own address, and the same deck has a reading view one path further along, linked from the deck itself. It is the same content, projected as a document: one heading hierarchy, a table of contents, landmarks, figures with their alt text.
It is a separate view rather than a mode, which matters more than it sounds: the presentation stays a presentation, and the accessible version is not a degraded copy somebody has to remember to update. Both are projections of the same record.
- Readable with JavaScript switched off, and with the page’s own styling switched off
- One column, relative units, no fixed canvas: it reflows on a phone instead of shrinking
- On the open web with no login, so anybody you send the link to can use it
- Generated from the field definitions, so a new slide type appears in it without extra work
And on a phone
On a small screen, a fixed slide canvas shrinks. The reading view reflows into one column, so someone opening the deck on a phone can read the content without fitting the whole slide on screen.
What this does not fix
The format removes the obstacles. It cannot make your content good, and a page about accessibility that pretends otherwise is being read by exactly the people who will check.
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Somebody still has to write the alt text
The field asks whether the image is meaningful or decorative. With OpenAI configured on the instance, AI can draft a description. The author still needs to supply useful alt text and check any generated description.
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The theme editor measures contrast, it does not enforce it
Pick a background and you get light or dark text against it automatically; that choice now goes to whichever of the two measures higher, not to whichever looks lighter, and the editor shows the ratio and the WCAG verdict next to the pickers that produced it. It reports rather than blocks: a low-contrast variant can be a deliberate brand decision, and a settings panel is not the place to overrule one. It covers the main colours and the background variants, so your own brand palette, and the judgement about what is legible enough, stay yours.
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Video and audio need captions
A slide can hold a video. Nothing about a typed field produces a transcript, and we do not generate captions for you.
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We make no conformance claim about your deck
Deckyard is not a certificate. If your organisation has to publish an accessibility statement, the reading view is the surface to test against, and we would rather help you test it than assert something on your behalf.
Check it rather than take our word for it
Try the editor in the sandbox without installing anything or creating an account. AI, uploads and publishing are disabled, and guest decks are deleted after 24 hours. To test the reading view, publish a deck on your own instance, follow its reading-view link and try it with JavaScript switched off.