Enhance your presentation slides for videos

Visual design and layout of content play an important role in the cognitive processing of information. Video works best when voice, text and images work together to reinforce each other, and guide the viewer’s attention. How you design your slides (or other visual aids) is also important for accessibility and inclusion. Here are a few techniques to aid viewer comprehension.

Keep your slides simple

• Your slides should have only the essential information. Use keywords, dot points, or simple sentences. Long sentences and paragraphs are hard to read on a slide in a video.
• Write 3 to 5 key messages or points per slide. This allows for a larger font and spacing, which helps legibility on a small screen and minimises cognitive load.
• Use more slides. They don’t cost extra, and it can take less time to format 3 slides with 3 simple dot points than one slide with lots of complex information.
• If you need to include complex information (charts, tables, etc.) add the document (Word, Excel, etc.) with the information before or after the video, in the framing text.

Designing your slides

• When laying out slides, think about how viewers scan information: when reading in English language, they start in the top-left corner and work their way down to the bottom-right. Structure your slides and direct the viewer’s attention by following this design principle.
• Use a sans serif font, as these are easier to read and more accessible.
• White space is important. Leave space between lines of text and images to enhance legibility.
• If you want to use colours (especially in graphs or charts) use an accessibility colour checker (e.g. Colour Contrast Checker) to make sure the information is accessible to people who have vision impacts.
• Animations and transitions can look impressive but don’t mix different types and only use them if they are adding value to the presentation. Animations and transitions can reduce accessibility so review the options you have chosen.

Consider how students access your video

You may be designing your slides on a larger screen, but there’s a good chance that’s not how your students will watch it. Most students use smaller laptops and may be using half the screen while also taking notes onscreen. Many students use their phones, often on public transport, and that also presents challenges.

When designing your slides, resize your window to see what it looks like on a phone or tablet. Does it flow? Is it legible? Alternatively, save your slides to your OneDrive account and open the file on different devices, in different environments. Does it still work?

Can students with accessibility requirements access the information on the slides? Add your slides under the embedded video/s on Canvas so students can review the information. If you have complex data (tables, charts, graphs, etc.) on the slides, check that they are also accessible. For more detailed information on this topic, take a look at our resource Microsoft PowerPoint: accessible practice.

Using Branded Slides

Using the official UTS branded presentation slide template is an ideal way to keep your design consistent across all your teaching materials; mismatched font sizes and styles, and clashing colours can be a distraction.

The templates can be accessed in Staff Connect (can only be viewed with a UTS staff account).

In the following video, we demonstrate how you can take an existing presentation and insert the branded slides: