How to prepare a presentation if there is a visually impaired person in the audience?

Question

When preparing a presentation, I usually avoid putting a lot of text and then read the slides. To me, the best presentation contains very good figures with presenter explaining them, and not reading what is already written. Thus, I prefer using little to no text and use only figures if possible.While I was helping a group of collegues for their project presentation, they mentioned that there is a visually impaired student in the classroom. Although I encouraged them to present the topic using figures and drawings (the topic was very suitable for this), I wonder now whether it is the best practice.Moreover, I realized that this might also be the case during a conference talk, for which we do not have the prior knowledge of the presence of a visually impaired person.So, my question is for the ones who have visual disability, who know such people, or who had similar experience. What is the best way to prepare a presentation? What to think and what not to overthink?

Answer 1

A few years ago, I had a student with a significant visual impairment, and in her IEP (Individual Education Plan), one of the accommodations was to have handouts with size 24 font on them. She always needed a seat toward the front, and if I wrote anything on the board, I always used a black marker in that class because red/green were too difficult for her to make out. I also emailed slideshows to her so she could view them on her iPad during class. I imagine that if you had enlarged printed versions of your slide show available at conferences, that would be appreciated by those often overlooked. You can also block off seats for those with visual/audio impairments near the front of the audience. When I have presented at conferences, I always put the link to my slideshow (using Google slides) on the opening slide so participants/audience members can follow along if they wish and also have the information for later use. I agree--adding too much text to slides distracts from your verbal message.

My experience is that providing accommodations proactively instead of as an afterthought tells those with disabilities that they are included automatically.