10.4 Handouts, export and accessible decks

What you'll be able to do

Make one deck work in all its later lives. As a printed handout, a PDF, a video that plays itself, and for someone hearing it through a screen reader. Most of a presentation's life happens after the talk.

Before you start

Your finished practice deck, with the speaker notes written. The delivery lesson's homework pays off here.

The work

1. Same either way: know the two print shapes and what each is for. Notes pages put one slide above its notes, one per page. That is the speaker's own script, and the copy to leave with someone who missed the talk. Your notes were the narration, so the pages explain themselves. Handouts put several slides on a page, as reference copies for the room. Both live under Ctrl+P → the layout dropdown. Three or six slides to a page keeps a handout readable, and the notes-pages option is the one most people never find.
2. Same either way: use PDF for distribution, exactly as the Word module taught. Press F12 and choose PDF. The layout is frozen, it opens everywhere, and it cannot be edited by accident. Send the PDF and keep the .pptx. A deck sent as a .pptx comes back with "one small improvement" from every person who received it.
3. No documented keyboard shortcut for this — use the menu: export a video when the deck must present itself. Go to File → Export → Create a Video. Every animation and transition plays on your recorded or fixed timings, with narration if you record it, and you get an .mp4. That suits people who were not in the room, a college portal, or a screen running on a loop at a stall. Timings recorded in the delivery lesson's rehearsal carry straight in.
4. Same either way: now the accessibility pass, which is the same three rules this subject keeps teaching, in slide form. Every slide gets a real title, because screen reader users move through a deck by titles, the way Word users move by headings. The title must sit in the layout's title placeholder, never in a drawn text box. Every image that carries meaning gets alt text (Shift+F10 → View Alt Text; decoration marked decorative). And colour never carries a meaning on its own.
5. No documented keyboard shortcut for this — use the menu: check the reading order, which is the hazard particular to slides. A screen reader announces a slide's objects in an order you have to verify. Review → Check Accessibility opens the pane, and its Reading Order tool lists the objects in the order they will be announced. Drag them until the order tells the slide's story: the title first, then the content, then the supporting parts. A slide put together by eye can read aloud as nonsense, and this tool is where that gets fixed.
6. Same either way: finish every deck with the checker, the way documents finish with theirs. Review → Check Accessibility, then work through the findings: missing titles, missing alt text, reading order, contrast. Thirty seconds once it is a habit, and it is the difference between a deck and a deck everyone can use.

Try it

From your practice deck, produce all four later lives. Notes pages and a three-per-page handout with Ctrl+P, a PDF, and a short video on your rehearsed timings. Then the access pass. Title every slide, write alt text for every image, fix one slide's reading order, and run the checker until it is clear.

Check yourself