Well...uh...as one of those lazy and thoughtless people, I have to admit
you really do have a point there!  It really is a lazier way of putting
the content out there that developing a good free-form web page on your
topic, perhaps using your outline as a starting point.

I think the valid usage of putting your slide show up, whether Corel or
PowerPoint, may be to let others see what you presented/how you presented
it who could not attend your presentation, and actually to make sure you
have an alternative way to even show your slides, because at least you can
get them with any graphical browser that way.  We usually have to do our
lectures with slides and getting a little extra mileage out of them
without much extra time seems good to us in academia who can barely eke
out the time to get the presentations done in the first place.

If it raises your opinion of me at all, I do believe in going in there and
adding comments and links and even little "side trips" to my slide files.
I hope I make it a little more like the presentation instead of just the
backdrop that way, and I find you do the slides a litlte differently if
you are thinking of it that way when you create the presentation. In
particular I always duplicate any links I had put into the slide since the
versions I am using do not automatically make them into hot links.  I
think you have to count on at least one edit per slide file, and actually
this is not that hard to do...I guess it is quick and easy enough it is
keeping me "lazy".  You just use the little Start-Run box to type notepad
slide1.htm, notepad slide2.htm, etc. (of course with whatever directory
you have dumped them in.)

This has been a great discussion, and I am looking forward to more...also
again Powerpoint at least has a text button for each slide (can the
screenreader see those- the alt text on the button says "text"?) and then
you can surf the whole thing as text.  Except slides that are just
illustrations won't have anything unless you edit that file also.

I will keep reading and thinking (and fixing my own stuff) and maybe we
can approach both of the software companies we have mentioned with ideas
on how to help users make these shows accessible.

Norm, I can't believe you'd think we could ever ignore *you*!!

Vikki Stefans, M.D., pediatric physiatrist (rehab doc for kids) at UAMS
and Arkansas Children's Hospital.  Working Mom of Sarah T. and Michael C.,
and wife of Henry Stefans, travel agent extraordinaire.  Every mom is a
working mom!- OK, dads too. Other address: [log in to unmask]

On Sat, 8 Jun 2002, Prof Norm Coombs wrote:

> PowerPoint canworkwith a screen reader especially if the slides focus on
> text materials.  It makes the material a bit more of a bother to
> navigate and read on the web than content ought to be, but it can be
> readily accessible.
>
> As a distance learning practitioner for 20 years, I deplore the widespread
> use of PowerPoint in distance learning.  It is one of the more thoughtless
> and lazy ways to provide materials and largely undermines the unique
> strengths of distance learning and totally misses the point of what
> PowerPoint is for as well.
>
> Teachers who just take material and throw it on the web and think that is
> distance learning are squeezing a square peg into a round hole.
>
> PowerPoint is intended to be the backdrop to a presentation and not the
> presentation.  It is like writing the outline for a book and publishing it
> and not bothering to write the book.
>
> However, I am sure I am a lone, cranky voice hollering down an empty rain
> barrel and will be immediately ignored.