[BlindMath] Tips on presenting slides

[Robin Williams]

Hi,

I am after any tips blind people may have on presenting scientific materials using slides.

Using R Markdown, I am able to produce my presentations in various formats. One of these is Powerpoint, but my general reluctance to go near MS Office, and the extra work that can be required to resize my slides, means I have settled on ioslides for now. This format renders the slides in an HTML document, and allows one to have additional control on the size of text and other appearance options directly from the R Markdown file, similar to LaTeX. These are all appealing features to me. However, when I open my presentation in my preferred web browser (Chrome), I need to press JAWS KEY + 3 to pass the left and right arrow keystroke (which changes the slide) through to the browser. However, the JAWS virtual buffer doesn't refresh, despite the slide changing on the screen. Has anyone tried a similar thing with any other screenreaders?

I am particularly interested to know what methods people use to take notes to assist in giving their presentations. I am happy to memorise a 20 minute presentation, but anything longer starts to take up an unreasonable amount of time and cognitive energy. My current solution is to use hard copy Braille, with a couple of bullet points for each slide. Do people have any alternative suggestions, and/or tips on how to streamline the process of giving scientific presentations?