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When designing presentations:

• Decide on 3 to 4 key points to be covered and organize material around these themes. Audiences need a clear framework based on some major themes in order to grasp and retrieve the ideas.

• Develop illustrations, stories, examples, audiovisuals, concept maps for major points. Restate the point after the example or illustration.

• Capture audience interest in the beginning of the presentation. Read a powerful quote, state a question that will be answered in the presentation or a strong generalization which contradicts common thought, introduce puzzling facts, tell a personal anecdote, give an example, tell a joke or do a demonstration.

• Plan to set the stage by telling the audience what will be covered in the presentation (e.g., How many of you drank a soda this week? What did you do with the can? Today we will be talking about the economic impact of recycling.)

• Pace presentations in 5-10 minute chunks. Doing the same thing for more than 10 minutes without a change of pace or transition may cause the audience to "tune out" and lose interest. This does not mean that you have to be some sort of entertainer or run a media show to keep audience interest, rather that you need to change your pace at regular intervals. For example, learn to punctuate your presentations with rhetorical questions, vivid examples, or demonstrations.

• Pace-changing transitions often occur easily if you link them to the presentation of your 3 to 4 key points.

• Front-load your presentation (put the most important facts in your first few slides).

• Make it big - test the presentation to make sure everything can be read from the back row.

• Keep it simple - No more than 6 lines per slide. No more than 7 words per line of text. Your audience can read faster than you can talk. You don't want their attention to split between the slide and you.

• Make it clear - choose fonts, font sizes, and colors that enhance readability of your slides. Most of PowerPoint/Keynote default font sizes ans color schemes work well. If you decide to experiment on your own, be sure not to reduce readability in the process.

• Be consistent in thought, word and deed - your goal should be to educate and inform your audience. Make sure the stages of your presentation and the visual aides you use follow a logical sequence.

• Select fonts carefully - use a sans-serif screen display font like Verdana for your on-screen presentation, and use a serif print display font like Times Roman for handouts.

• Don't detract: stay away from PowerPoint/Keynote bells ans whistles like builds, transitions, animations, and sound effects. If you absolutely have to use the frills, only add them to slides that don't contain key facts. That way the presentation will look pretty, but the "real" content won't be lost due to visual interference.

• Only use pictures to teach, not to decorate or entertain. The on screen text is processed in visual memory because it is seen, viewed with the eyes. Relevant pictures do not help because they are also stored in visual memory along with the text - on new information is added over a different channel. Unrelated pictures in a presentation, however, have a negative effect on audience enjoyment and the learning of the materials. (Bartsch & Cobern, 2003) A picture may be worth a thousand words, but when you use an unrelated picture those thousand words drown out what you are trying to say.

Common accessibility problems in presentations are:

• As noted earlier poor contrast between background ans text makes the presentation difficult to read.
• Graphics, figures, logos and charts so not contain captions and/or alt tags so there is no text to be read out loud for those who rely on assistive technology.
• If the information is not structured within the auto layouts provided by most presentation packages the text is not available to text readers.
• Audio and/or video will usually require accommodation unless captioning or a transcript is provided by the content author.