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Hi All,

Last week I translated a PowerPoint presentation. I used PowerPoint 2007 and Jaws 11. Below is information that may be helpful to others of you, and I suspect other screen readers behave in more or less the same way.

About Jaws specifically, my own experience was that it's very usable, but needs to support PowerPoint a little better. Jaws doesn't speak in the box where you name your file. It doesn't properly announce what characters and words you're deleting. It doesn't correctly read partial lines, like when you want to hear from the cursor to the beginning or end of the line. It doesn't read whatever you have highlighted. And it doesn't really allow you to interact with tables. It's possible that Jaws 12 works better, but I doubt it since I don't remember reading anything about better support for PowerPoint in the release notes.

Here is a tutorial for working with PowerPoint 2003 and 2007 and Jaws. It covers creating a presentation, showing the slides, and making handouts:

http://www.freedomscientific.com/Training/training-powerpoint.asp

In a nutshell, to translate directly in PowerPoint, do the following:

1. Open the presentation.

2. Press the arrows or spacebar to move through the slides.

3. When you get to a slide you want to translate, press tab once to get to the title or twice to get to the body of the slide. Jaws calls this the Object Area.

4. Press the context key, down-arrow to Edit, and press Enter. If the slide is an image, there is no Edit option.

5. Work with the text of the slide in the usual way.

6. When you finish translating, press Escape once to get back to the Object area, where you can tab to the title/body of the slide, or press Escape twice to get back to the list of slides.

A few things to keep in mind:

First,based on what I've read, you want to set the language for each individual slide after you finish translating it (i.e., before pressing Escape to exit the edit area). There doesn't seem to be a way to change language all at once.

Second, PowerPoint gives you the option of making a handout based on the presentation. I tried doing this to get access to the tables, etc., but the document that is produced isn't very accessible. It seems to be a link to the slide. Jaws reads each slide in its entirety, but I couldn't comfortably move around the document to read parts of it or to edit.

Third, you can save the presentation as *.rtf by pressing alt+f, going into Save As, and choosing Outline/RTF, which is near the bottom of the list of options. The resulting file includes most of the text of the presentation, but the tables and graphs were left out.

finally, if your presentation has tables, you probably want to get a sighted person to help you extract them. I wasn't able to work with the tables directly in PowerPoint. I couldn't copy them to the clipboard with ctrl+a followed by ctrl+c, but a friend of mine had no problem doing the same thing with the mouse, so he copied my tables into a blank Word document; then when I finished translating them, he copied them back into the presentation.

I spent/wasted a lot of time figuring all this out, so I thought I'd post to make things a little easier for others of you who are new to PowerPoint.

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