How to Engage a Visually Impaired Audience with PowerPoint

Engaging a visually impaired audience can be difficult. For one, not everyone has the same level of visual impairment. Some of your audience members may have conditions that are corrected with eye glasses or contact lenses. Others may have had surgery to correct some or all of their vision issues. You may have some audience members who have no level of vision correction, but still have varying levels of vision. Some may be able to see larger images or fonts, while some may be completely unable to see anything.

To help connect with your visually impaired audience, you’ll want to use these tricks that work with any audience

Add action to your presentation – If some of your audience can see, tracking your movement will keep them more engaged than if you just stand still.
Include moments to make them laugh – This doesn’t have to be jokes. Maybe you have a personal story to tell that fits in with your presentation, where you end up laughing at yourself. If your audience perceives that you have a sense of humor, they are more at ease.
Try to evoke emotion – Most of the time, the best way to keep an audience engaged it to talk about something in a way that makes them feel something-joy, empathy, anticipation. If you can get your audience feeling something, they’re going to want to hear the rest of what you say!

Using props becomes much more difficult with a visually impaired audience, but if some of your audience has at least partial site, you’re going to want to make use of visual pieces to keep their attention focused on you. Using a PowerPoint presentation is a great way to help drive home important parts of your presentation and illustrations often help bring emotion to presentations.

With PowerPoint and a large projector screen, you can create presentations that will be able to be seen by the part of your audience that does have some vision capabilities. For example, you can use a larger font on the text areas of your PowerPoint presentation. This helps to insure that everyone who can see, can see what you’re trying to present.

PowerPoint also allows you to create visual images that you can use to connect with your audience, to help keep them engaged. You can focus in on a specific part of an image to make it appear larger on screen, with a single deck dedicated to just a few pixels of the image, if necessary. You need great software and a fantastic image to do this, but it can be done.

In short, there are ways to engage a visually impaired audience. It takes a bit of work, but with some