PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 makes it easy to accommodate those with hearing impairments or language barriers. These features don’t just enhance accessibility—they make presentations clearer and more inclusive for everyone. Thankfully, they’re very easy to set up.
Offering Automatic Subtitles in PowerPoint Presentations
I always prefer to make my presentations more inclusive to people in the audience with hearing disabilities. It also helps everyone follow along with what the presenter is saying, breaking the barrier of individual speech traits and accents.
The Captions & Subtitles is one of the cloud-enhanced features in Microsoft 365 and is powered by Microsoft Speech Services. This means that your spoken words will be sent to Microsoft’s servers for processing.
PowerPoint candisplay captions or subtitles on-screenin over 60 languages. Here’s how you can set up real-time subtitling for PowerPoint presentations.
The spoken language is the language you will be speaking while presenting, and the subtitle language is the language in which the on-screen subtitles will be displayed for your audience.
In the same menu, you can customize the position where the subtitles are displayed—in a margin below or above the slides or overlaid on the top or bottom. You can customize more appearance settings by clickingSubtitle Settings, and heading toMore Settings (Windows). This will take you toaccessibility settings of Windows.
Additionally, in theCaptions & Subtitlessection, you cancheck theAlways Use Subtitlesbox to have subtitles always startwhen a slide show starts (it’s off by default). Of course, you may turn the feature on or off while presenting. Just click theToggle Subtitlesbutton on the toolbar below the main slide during a slide show.
Captions & Subtitles depends on a cloud-based speech service, so it’s important to have a fast and reliable internet connection.
Setting Up Live Translation for Presentations
If you’re presenting to a large audience or within a virtual team spread geographically, there’s a good chance that not everyone in the audience will have the same level of comfort with the language you’re presenting in.
You can make your presentation more accessible by adding live translation as you present.It’s a neat derivative and often overlooked benefit of theCaptions & Subtitlesfeature.
While setting up subtitles, instead of choosing theSubtitle Languagethe same asSpoken Language, change it to any other language that fits your needs. This will add live translation to your slide show without any additional effort. In the screenshot above, I spoke in Hindi and set up the subtitle language to English, which turned out flawless.
Give your whole presentation a run-through to ensure the translation works for every slide. If possible, get a native language speaker to check it for you.
Real-time captioning of a slide show in PowerPoint is a powerful feature and a showcase of what cloud-based speech processing can offer. It takes only a couple of minutes to set up and canmake your presentation more impactfuland earn you some brownie points!
