Nine Employer Expectations That Will Not Fit on One Slide
A university careers service has a 12-slide workshop deck built from an old template. On slide 4, the Employer Expectations placeholder contains nine bullet points, some about 30 words long. PowerPoint's Shrink text on overflow has reduced the body text to 11 pt while the title is 40 pt. On the lab projector the bottom two bullets are cut off, and a visually impaired student using a screen reader hears the bullets in a confusing order because a decorative text box sits over the list. The careers adviser wants to keep all nine points because employers supplied them. The workshop starts in two days.
1. What is the best way to make slide 4 readable without losing the nine employer points, and why is turning off autofit a poor solution?
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Slide 4 is trying to do too much. The nine employer points should be grouped into two or three themes, such as communication, teamwork, and digital skills, and split across two or three slides with three points each. Each point should be edited to roughly 8-12 words, with the full employer wording moved to speaker notes or a handout. Body text should stay around 20-24 pt; if it cannot, the slide needs splitting again. Turning off autofit is a poor fix because the text simply overflows beyond the placeholder and off the slide, which is why the bottom bullets are already cut off. Shrinking to 11 pt hides the problem by making the slide unreadable. Splitting preserves all nine points and keeps the projected slide legible.
2. How should the adviser fix the reading order and ensure the slide works with a screen reader?
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The reading order problem usually comes from using floating text boxes instead of the layout's placeholders. The adviser should rebuild slide 4 with the built-in Title and Content placeholders, then paste the bullets into the content placeholder so the screen reader follows the intended order. The decorative text box should be removed or marked as decorative so it is not announced. In the Selection Pane, she can check the stacking order, and the Accessibility Checker's Reading Order pane can confirm the title is read first, followed by the bullets. She should also give the slide a unique title and check color contrast. Fixing the master layout prevents the same problem on later slides.
3. How can the adviser keep the new slides visually consistent with the rest of the deck without repeating manual formatting?
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The adviser should set bullet levels, bullet characters, indents, and line spacing in the Slide Master rather than formatting each new slide by hand. The body placeholder can define first-level and second-level formatting, so pasted text inherits the right structure. Theme fonts should match the rest of the deck, and the title size should follow the master rather than being typed as 40 pt on one slide. This makes the split slides look intentional and prevents a later editor from reintroducing 11 pt text or a stray font. She should then check one revised slide in Slide Sorter view against the other slides for consistent margins and spacing.