How to Make a Basic PowerPoint 2003 Presentation with JAWS
Overview of PowerPoint
PowerPoint is a presentation software program used to supplement an oral presentation or to display information in a slide show format. You can save the presentation in various formats including HTML. You can send your presentation to colleagues via email or print your presentation to use as a handout.
This tutorial is based on JAWS 8.1 with PowerPoint 2003.
When you launch the PowerPoint program, a blank slide appears. This is the title/introduction slide. The main screen is the normal view and is divided into sections or panes. The first pane, visually on the left, is the thumbnails pane. It shows a list of each slide in the presentation as thumbnails or small images of the slides. The middle section contains the slide pane where text and other objects are placed on the slide. JAWS recognizes the placeholders on the slide where text can be typed, such as titles, subtitles and body text. Additionally, you can insert graphics, multimedia (including audio), tables and graphs. The third pane, on the far right, is the menu pane. The content of the menu pane varies based on the task, but will be used to access the menus for layout, design, etc. Lastly, there is the notes page pane underneath the slide pane at the bottom of the page which allows you to type presenter notes for use during the presentation.
You can navigate between these sections or panes by pressing the F6 key. F6 will jump from the thumbnails pane to the slide pane to the menu pane and finally the notes page pane.
The slide pane has two levels, the object level and the edit level. The object level lets you tab between objects appearing on the slide. The edit level, which is accessed by pressing enter on a placeholder, lets you create and edit content. JAWS gives you descriptive information about the slide, which is helpful in understanding the overall layout.
As you create your presentation, you can press F6 until you land on the thumbnails pane. Here you can arrow through the list of slides you have created. This is helpful when you want to review or edit the sequence of the slides in your presentation. Note that slides are listed according to the information in the title placeholder, but you may decide whether or not to title each slide.
PowerPoint has the usual windows menu bar, tool bar, status bar, and title bar, and you can use the standard Microsoft Office applications key commands in PowerPoint. For example, to save a presentation press ALT+f to bring up the file menu and press the letter “a” to get to the “save as” option.
The following steps are designed to help you create a basic text only PowerPoint. Let’s get started!!
Next: Build a Basic PPT