GAAD Speakers

Thank you for participating in Global Accessibility Awareness Day! We have best practices and some resources to help you, as well as a timeline for when we’ll be asking for content. Please reach out to us with any questions or concerns at [email protected].

Speaker pre-GAAD tasks

  • Register for GAAD starting April 1, 2025.
  • Attend the GAAD Tech Run on Friday, April 25 at 10:00 AM central time via Zoom. This optional meeting will provide you with an overview of the event logistics, and time for your questions.
  • Send a link or file of your presentation slides to [email protected] by Monday, May 5, 2025. Sharing your slides early will help captionists and ASL interpreters be prepared.
  • You'll be paired with a moderator in April. We recommend you connect with your moderator before the event to determine who will share screens, what the moderator should say to introduce the speakers or topic, and verify how to pronounce names.
  • Review our Community Agreement.
  • Review our best practices for inclusive presentations guide below.

Best Practices for Inclusive Presentations

Design an Accessible Presentation

Please use the following guidelines to ensure that your presentations are visually accessible to attendees in an online environment.

Basic Slide Design

  • Use an easy-to-read font.
  • Use bullet points instead of full paragraphs.
  • Aim for a font size of 18 to 24 point.
  • Choose text and background colors that have good contrast and are easy to read. You can use a contrast checker to check for good contrast.
  • If you will have your camera on during your slides, consider where it may appear on the screen relative to your slides. We recommend building space into your slides to prevent the video from blocking your content.
  • Use the optional GAAD Google Slides template (link forthcoming) to produce an accessible slide presentation.
  • It’s easier to make your original presentation slides accessible than it is to produce an accessible PDF of your slides. Refer to PowerPoint accessibility advice and Google Slides accessibility tips.

Graphs and Charts             

  • Use the built-in options for creating charts and graphs instead of using an image or screen capture, so that a person using assistive technology can access the data.
  • For color blindness considerations, add patterns or labels in graphs and charts, or use the Viz Palette Designer to select sight-friendly color palettes.

Images, Videos, and Animations

  • Avoid blinking text and animations that endlessly repeat.
  • If your presentation features lots of animations, videos, etc., please include a warning at the start of your talk. This is especially needed if any contain a lot of flicker.
  • Be mindful of progressing quickly back and forth through slides.
  • Include alt text for all images in the slides. WebAIM has useful information about alt text and how to write it.

Sharing Slides                  

  • Speakers are encouraged to share their slides with attendees.             
  • Include speaker notes with your files if the file format allows. In particular, describe any images, tables, charts, etc. in the notes.

Be Inclusive in Your Presentation

  • If your presentation is interactive, tell the audience at the start what you will be doing (“I will ask you to write down some thoughts multiple times during the presentation, so please get a pen and paper now,” or “I’ll give you 1 minute to fill out this poll”), and actually give them enough time to complete the work.
  • Speakers are encouraged to use an external microphone or headset with mic to help cut down on external noises (people talking, computer fan noises, etc.) and make it easier for live captioning. Make sure the mic is directly in front of your mouth to ensure the best audio capture.
  • Speak slowly and clearly, like a newscaster, to make it easier for the captionist and audience to understand you.
  • If you are answering questions from the chat, read the question out loud and credit the person asking it before responding.
  • If you are using acronyms or jargon, state the full name, followed by the acronym spelling (for example, “American Broadcasting Company, ABC”) or definition the first time you reference it. You can also explain them in your speaker notes or on the slides of the presentation to make it clear to the audience as well. (When in doubt, assume it’s jargon!)
  • Describe images to the audience as you present, and give a brief description of a video before you play it.
  • Instead of asking your audience to read a slide, read it aloud (the audience may have a very small screen, or may not be able to see the slides).
  • Read aloud any URLs to the audience. Use a URL shortener like a Z link, tinyurl or bit.ly to make it easier.

Live Captioning

During the Global Accessibility Awareness Day conference, sessions will have live captioning. In order to improve the quality of this service, we ask everyone to speak slowly and clearly so the captioning service is able to accurately capture what you say.