Once a scheduled part of business life, presentations are now essential in the virtual workplace. The introduction of work from home policies last year catapulted presentations from being part of the process, to the focal point. Sales and team meetings, training and internal communications, are now digitally reliant.

There has been a huge investment to adapt presentations for the new working environment, but for potentially 20 percent of the audience that have disabilities, all that could have been wasted. Regardless of whether the disability is permanent or not, visible or nonvisible, too much content over the past year missed the mark and continues to do so. Despite the barriers removed by remote working, if content is not accessible, it merely exchanges old barriers for new. Figures from Scope, the disability equality charity, show that 19 percent of working age adults are disabled and 4.1 million disabled people are in work. The stories they have shared illustrate the impact of virtual work, with people finding it difficult to participate in meetings and left feeling isolated and frustrated.

There are ethical and legal imperatives for accessibility, which make it a priority, because communications although rarely mentioned directly, are central to business and that will continue regardless of what the ‘new normal’ looks like. Even if you’re not aware of current staff with accessibility needs you should act. Anticipate the needs of future staff. Ensure new starters feel included from when they join. Key places to start include your onboarding presentations, learning content, and ensuring company-wide guidelines promote accessible content. It’s an ethical, legal, and business priority – there’s no excuse to let standards fall.

What does best practice look like? Five areas to consider:
There’s a lot you can do to make your content more accessible to your teams. Small changes and being actively aware of potential issues make a huge difference.

Presentations should always go through quality controls. Make sure that it’s not just spelling and grammar you’re looking out for. Test for accessibility – view content with different technology setups or watch without audio for example.

You don’t have to be an expert in PowerPoint or accessibility – for example most presentation tools come with accessible features already built in to help.

1. Colour and text
Colour contrasts can make it difficult to read text and make interpreting diagrams difficult. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a great place to start. Colour can offer additional information, but don’t rely on it. Green for positive and red for negative is a classic indicator, but the most common form of colour blindness makes it hard to differentiate. Add explanatory labels and visual cues like ticks or crosses.

Text-heavy PowerPoint presentations are difficult for everyone, but for people with dyslexia, it’s not just boring, it can be impossible to comprehend. Keep fonts simple, use bold instead of underlining or italics for emphasis, and avoid big blocks of text entirely. When sharing slides, set the order of text on slides for screen readers.

2. Audio and video accessibility
Be sure that your ideas can be implemented in a way that is accessible without relying on audio or pictures for cues or information. For example during company update calls sharing a text-script ahead of time and making sure all presenters have their video turned on to aid lip-reading are simple steps that hugely benefit those with auditory impairments. Most meeting platforms have a feature that will automatically generate subtitles while a presenter is speaking. Similarly for video content, make sure you’ve used captioning by default.

3. Time constraints on interactions
Presentations that are engaging and interactive are more effective, but make sure you’re not accidentally preventing people from taking part. For example, presentations during which staff select options for a poll under a time constraint may be difficult for those with impaired motor skills or dyslexia.

4. Equipment variations
Especially in remote working environments, your content will be viewed on different types of screen and with settings that you can’t control – resolutions, audio quality or displayable colours. This is called situational impairment, when someone views content in an environment that reduces their ability to perceive the information. What looks good on a designer’s huge Apple display might not work for all.

5. The new normal
A return to office-based working won’t make the challenges of accessibility go away. It’s important that we look at how to make accessibility our go-to setting moving forwards. Make sure your team doesn’t go back to business as usual.

Accessible content means teams are engaged, able to participate and empowered to contribute. Champion these issues with IT teams to make sure everyone has accessibility tools installed. Work with marketing to make accessibility part of brand guidelines. Help sales leaders understand how to make content accessible. HR teams have a crucial role to play in making accessibility the standard for their businesses – better presentations are a great place to start.