[NFBCS] Presenting using PowerPoint Part 2

[John Miller]

Hello,

Recently I posted to this list about presenting using PowerPoint.
Curtis Chong kindly pointed me to the documentation about how the status cells work.
Slide show mode for PowerPoint uses the virtual cursor it turns out.
It is possible to pay attention to dot 7 and dot 8 in the status cells to know if there is more information on the current line or not.
If dot 7 and dot 8 are raised on the last status cell, then the braille display does not need to be panned to the right.
In this case, down arrow to get to new information.
If you have feature improvement suggestions for JAWS working with PowerPoint please feel free to send your ideas on this thread or contact me at johnmillerphd at hotmail.com.
Also, I suggest you contact Vispero directly with this link to their contact form: 'https://vispero.com/contact/'.
Also, I have contacted Jonathan Mosen directly if NFB might have a coordinated approach that may yield better results.
Here is what I pasted into the Vispero contact form about this topic.
I am writing to ask the Vispero team to consider making presenting in PowerPoint as a blind person more natural and more powerful when using a braille display only for gathering information.
Blind people are effective communicators if they reference hard copy braille while they click through their PowerPoint presentations.
I am now asking the Vispero team if it is possible to dispense with all hard copy braille and only use the information sent to the braille display during slide show mode.
A fall back position might be to keep on hand hard copy braille for the contents of tables, but to depend on slides.
Is it common for sighted peers to orally present a PowerPoint with no written notes.
It is my experience that many engineering workplaces the slide notes are purposefully left empty.
In this way the presentation can be reviewed in slide show mode by a reviewing audience.
After such a review the PowerPoint file itself can be provided as a final copy to a customer or to other groups.
It is typical that I configure JAWS to speech only mode when I begin a presentation.
I receive the prompts from JAWS about what to say by using the braille display only.
1. I am pleased that JAWS allows the ability to set a temporary placemarker in slideshow mode in PowerPoint using control+Windows+k.
For example, it is possible in slide show mode to set a temporary placemarker at the current bullet of the slide when a question is asked by the audience.
The audience can ask a question about something far earlier or far later than the current flow of the presentation.
The presenter can then set a temporary placemarker, go to the area of the slide that addresses the question, and then return to the temporary placemarker with the "k" command to resume the presentation.
This is a useful and excellent feature.
2. Could it be possible to jump forward or jump backward a set number of down or up arrow commands?
For example, consider a PowerPoint that is spanned by 30 down arrow commands to cover the information.
It would be helpful to have a skip forward command that jumped 5 down arrows and a skip backwards command that jumped 5 up arrows.
This is similar to page up or page down in a notepad file.
Of course in PowerPoint slideshow mode, page up or down are taken up by other controls such as next slide and previous slide.
3.  It would be helpful if JAWS could be programmed to skip over repetitive text such as a company header or footer.
In the workplace, my team uses a header that requires 6 down arrows to skip past.
In this case, I can press control home to go to the top of the current slide
To get to the first bullet I may need to press down arrow 6 times to arrive at that bullet.
4. When in PowerPoint in slideshow mode, I find it cumbersome to move past a table to the next element.
I am very pleased about the layered table reading command, but some times I just need to move to the next element past the table as quickly as possible.
In my recent presentation there was a table in the middle of the slide and to get past the table I needed to down arrow 10 times.
5. I invite Vispero to gather information from the community about what is exactly sent to the braille display in slide show mode.
I appreciate reviewing my own PowerPoint in slide show mode to bring my attention to the types of elements such as list nesting level 1 or end list.
I am not sure that when presenting I want the braille display to say table when I down arrow or when I down arrow again to say end table.
I feel this is a lot of key presses when I am speaking the information to an audience.

Very Best,
John Miller
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://nfbnet.org/pipermail/nfbcs_nfbnet.org/attachments/20260603/3b9b6752/attachment.htm>