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By Alistair Edwards - November 2002
Alistair Edwards gives advice on public speaking - bearing in mind that not everyone in the audience may be able to see your slides or hear you speak.
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You turn up for your talk. You have carefully prepared your slides (following Brian Kelly's advice [1]). In fact you are rather pleased with their design and the way they will support and illustrate your talk. You have made sure that they work on the equipment supplied and you are all ready to go. And then you notice… There is a dog lying by one of the seats on the front row, and this is not just any dog, it is a guide dog. There is a blind man in your audience. He is not going to appreciate your slides; he is not even going to be able to see them.
What do you do? Should you forget about using your slides all together? This article presents some advice on preparing and giving talks bearing in mind that it is quite likely that not everyone in the audience will be able to see or hear as well as you might otherwise assume.
Well, the first advice is: Don't Panic. (Echoing both Brian Kelly and Douglas Adams!) Of course, the best thing to do is anticipate this eventuality before the day of the talk, when you are preparing it, and having read this article, that will presumably be the case.
You should not discard your slides, or prepare a talk without them. While you might fear that it could seem an insult to use them when at least one person in the room will get nothing from them, you should still prepare slides and you will use them. The point is to think in advance what are the slides for and how you are going to use them.
There are usually two main reasons for using slides. The first one is that they act as an aide memoire to yourself as the speaker. You have defined a structure for your talk and that is embodied in the slides. Furthermore, each slide will help you to remember what you wanted to say on that topic. Clearly this role is unaffected by the presence of the blind audience member.
The second role is to help the audience follow the talk. They will also get to see the structure and will have visual reinforcement of whatever you are saying. Of course the blind audience member will not get that benefit. For him, therefore, having a clear structure will help him to follow and you can help with explicit signposting. So don't assume everyone has read each slide (it sounds obvious - but you'd be surprised...) For instance, if you move to a new topic, you may have a slide with a title for that topic. Show the slide - but accompany it with a suitable cue: 'Moving now to...'
Some slides carry more important graphical information that is difficult to present in another way. Don't leave those out either. You should again think about the purpose of the slide and give at least a summary of its contents. For instance, if you were showing the following pie chart,
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| Figure 1: Example of graphical information, a pie |
| chart showing the proportion of the population |
| aged 45-54 who have physical disabilities |
you might say, 'This pie chart shows the proportion of the population aged 45-54 who have a non-severe physical limitation, represented by the red wedge at 17%; those 6% with a severe physical limitation in blue, and the majority with no recognized limitation'. This would be preferable to 'There is a white circle with a blue segment and a red segment in the upper left quadrant. The red segment is about three times as big as the blue one...' Think before you point, too. In this example you would not say, 'This segment represents people with a non-severe physical limitation, and this one those with a severe limitation,' leaving your blind listener guessing as to the relative sizes.
When I had a research student who was blind and other students would be giving seminars, I would remind them in advance that there would be at least one person in the audience who would not be able to see their slides and invariably they would say afterwards that their talk had gone much better than usual because they had thought about their slides. They knew that they could not stand pointing at a slide. Instead they had to think about what the slide was really meant to convey. If it was too complex to describe, then it was probably too complex visually for all the audience.
At the beginning of your talk you should acknowledge the fact that there is someone in the audience who will not see your slides and you can reassure them that you will be describing the content of your slides. Don't be embarrassed to mention it.
What is the most stupid sentence to start a talk with? 'Can you hear me at the back?' Presumably anyone who cannot hear will not be able to answer, and there may be people in the audience (not even at the back) who cannot hear you - because they have a hearing impairment. In this instance the most important thing to remember is to use any amplification that is provided. Speakers often seem shy about using microphones and amplification. They will say 'I don't need that', and try to project their voice around the room. Yet most microphones are not simply connected to the public address system. They are often part of a 'loop' or other transmitter that can be picked up by people's hearing aids. Using the microphone does not just mean that your voice is amplified in the room, but can provide an almost direct connection to any hearing aid users.
So, if you find it uncomfortable to hear your own voice amplified - practise. Get used to it and then next time you are giving a public presentation, you will use it without further thought, to the benefit of everyone, including any hearing-impaired people.
Some deaf people lip-read. They will probably sit at the front and you can help them by making your mouth movements more apparent. That does not mean speaking slowly and loudly with exaggerated lip movements, but rather:
What if the 'stranger' in the room is not a guide dog, but a sign language interpreter? Again, preparation is the best approach. Ideally the interpreter should have advanced warning about what you are going to talk about. Give them notes or copies of your slides or whatever you have - and as far in advance as possible. That way they have an idea of the vocabulary involved and can be prepared. Most signs in sign language represent words or concepts, but if your talk is very technical and involves a lot of jargon, signs may not exist for those words. In that case, the signer will have to fingerspell the word. This is much slower than signing, and, again it helps if the signer has the word written down in advance so they know what they are spelling.
Cutting down on jargon and presenting it slowly and clearly can help, but otherwise it is probably best to try to ignore the presence of signers. In other words, talk to your audience and resist the temptation to speak to signers or to periodically check with them that they have been able to translate each portion.
Much of my research is concerned with making computers more accessible to people with disabilites. A frequent observation in this kind of work is that when you make it easier for (say) a blind person to use something, that improves the design for all users. So it is with public speaking. If your talk is prepared such that a blind or a deaf person can understand and appreciate it, you will probably find that the rest of the audience also understood it better too.
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Alistair Edwards
Senior Lecturer
Department of Computer Science
University of York
Heslington
York
YO10 5DD
United Kingdom
URL:<http://www-users.ac.uk/~alistair/>
Email: alistair@cs.york.ac.uk
Phone: +44 1904 432775
Alistair Edwards is a lecturer at the University of York. He has a long-standing research interest in accommodating the needs of people with disabilities in human-computer interfaces.
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For citation purposes:
Edwards, A. "Giving Presentations with Accessibility in Mind", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/accessibility/>
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