Hi Sarah, First of all, your professors can generate PDF versions of their PowerPoint presentations that are accessible. There's a mode where they can generate handouts of the slides in this format, and sometimes conferences will ask that presentations will be provided in this format, if only to get around the incompatibilities between different versions of PowerPoint where fonts are either missing or rendered incorrectly when the raw PowerPoint files are provided. Keynote, Open Office, and various other presentation applications also have this feature. The easiest way to read the PDF versions of such slides is to use Skim in presentation mode. You can set this from the view menu on the menu bar, or use the shortcut Command-Option-P to go to this mode. This assumes that your notes are displayed one slide to a page. They could be printed out two, four, or six slides to a page, and then you would just have to use normal portrait or landscape orientation. As I recall, Preview's f ull screen mode doesn't work as well. Skim also has a full screen mode, but it also has a presentation mode that works pretty well. You can also use the export to PDF option (under the File menu for Keynote, select export) the same way that your professors can export their PowerPoints to PDF, and make your presentations with Skim. The view menu options for Skim include presentation options (Command-Control-T) for slide transitions, etc.
Now, it's possible to make the output from PowerPoint not accessible to VoiceOver, but I don't think that's the default if they export the slides as PDFs, and don't try to do any fancy compression on the output. There are other ways that the slides could be inaccessible, such as if a graphic, like the screen capture of a slide with text were used in place of the actual slide with inserted text. However, I know that 5 years ago there were Mac VoiceOver users who got along fine with the PDF versions of PowerPoint slides, and that was back when Keynote was much less accessible. Furthermore, as it happens I just received a PowerPoint presentation as an email attachment the day before your post, and was able to read the text in each slide on my iPhone, which doesn't have Keynote on it. This is just the QuickLook or Preview mode (or whatever it's called) that comes up by default for this .pps file. HTH. Cheers, Esther On Apr 21, 2012, at 6:08 AM, Sarah Alawami wrote: > Oh i've had a play with keynote and when I click play nothing shows up in the > slides just an ok button and a next pref button. Iv'e used it to rehearse my > own power point stuff I have to do in class and it fails miserably. > > Take care. > On Apr 20, 2012, at 11:58 PM, Anne Robertson wrote: > >> Hello Sarah, >> >> Keynote will read PowerPoint documents. >> >> Cheers, >> >> Anne >> >> >> On 21 Apr 2012, at 08:04, Sarah Alawami wrote: >> >>> Hello. My professors put up Microsoft power point presentations of their >>> lectures up on our system at the university. I need access to these as i >>> was gone. Is there a method I can access these via mac osx lion? >>> >>> Thanks. <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> The Mac-Access mailing list is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free! Please remember to update your membership options periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/>
