Accessibility, Consistency, and Quality Assurance
Domain focus: whether every audience member can consume the deck, whether it looks like one document, and whether it holds up under review.
Accessibility essentials
Every slide needs a unique, descriptive title - screen readers announce it first. Set reading order in the Selection Pane, remembering that items are read from the bottom of the list upward. Supply alt text for informative images and mark decorative ones. Meet WCAG contrast: 4.5:1 for body text, 3:1 for large text and meaningful graphics. Never encode meaning in colour alone. Add captions or subtitles for video, and use real table headers rather than merged cells. The Accessibility Checker pane lists errors by category with a Why Fix and How To Fix explanation.
Consistency and QA
Consistency comes from theme inheritance, a fixed type scale, one alignment grid, and identical footers with slide numbers. QA is a separate pass: run spelling and search for repeated wrong names, review Slide Sorter view at thumbnail size for off-grid elements, verify every figure against its source, test all hyperlinks, run Inspect Document to strip comments and personal information before external release, and open the exported file on a second machine.
Worked example
A 40-slide review finds three untitled section slides, a brand orange at 2.8:1 on white, and two videos without captions. Fix: add real titles, darken the orange for text use while keeping the brand tone for large shapes, and upload caption files. Reasoning: each item blocks a different user group, and all three are flagged automatically, so fixing them costs minutes rather than a re-review.
Traps that cost marks
Mark as Final treated as security; alt text reading "image1"; decorative icons described verbosely; screenshots of tables; pasted slides importing foreign fonts and colours.