Job-talk season will soon be upon us, and before that the formidable Eastern APA. Well-appointed philosophers now come equipped with sleek slide-shows in which years of toil have been reduced to bullet points and fuzzy photos of colleagues in their offices. Although the Dark Ages of Powerpoint have passed, some presenters don’t take account of the difficulty certain members of their audience — among them, perhaps, the more eminent — will have in seeing their point. Literally.
▶ Update: A very helpful comment from Teresa Blankmeyer Burke includes a link to guidelines recommended by the American Printing House for the Blind. The APH favors sans-serif fonts. I myself find Helvetica and its ilk harder to read in bulk than, say, Garamond. One compromise would be “slab-serif” fonts (the example below is American Typewriter; look here or here for more examples); “old-style” or “antique” fonts (Garamond, Janson, Goudy Old Style), may also work; avoid Times and other “modern” or “didone” fonts. The APH recommends emphatically that grey-scale graphics (“black-and-white” photos, shadowed letters) be avoided.
It’s easy to make your work accessible to the visually impaired. The bonus in doing so is that everyone will benefit. My aim here is simply to offer a few tips on accessibility. But since accessibility and good graphic design go hand in hand, the advice given here may be useful more generally.
Avoid complexity
Avoid complexity first of all. The slide below has been designed using a rectangular grid of 12 by 8 units, with the vertical subdivided to yield 16. Ideally nothing should be spaced or sized smaller than that. Ten to twelve lines of text is about as much as you should put on a slide. More than that will force your font to be too small, or your line-spacing too narrow. In any case twenty lines of quotation, however apt, will exceed your listeners’ capacity to remember.
▶The outer, greyish area can be used for a header and footer (I like presentations in which the slides are numbered: doing so makes it easy to refer to them in the Q&A).
Easy reading
Avoid sans-serif fonts (except perhaps for headings). Avoid font faces with thin strokes (like Didot).
▶ Helvetica (and its poor relation Arial) is the archetypal computer sans, so famous a movie was made about it. Serif fonts suited to projection display include Cochin, Palatino (used above), Minion, and Georgia. American Typewriter, a “slab serif” font, is useful for headings.
Black type on a white background creates trouble for people with cataracts or other defects of the lens or cornea. The same goes for white type on a black background: in high contrast bright bleeds into dark. Other combinations to avoid are heavily saturated primary colors and colors of similar lightness (grey-scale value).
▶ You can test the grey-scale look by switching your monitor temporarily to greyscale (on a Mac, open System Preferences; select Universal Access > Seeing; click “Use grayscale” in the Display section).
Some people like to include extraneous photos in their slides — authors they’re citing, famous people, cute animals. Think of it this way: your audience isn’t going to remember much. Which do you want them to remember: your conclusions or Einstein’s tongue?
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