Create presentation slides for teaching

JPEG images are one of the most widely used formats online and in presentations. They have a sliding scale of compression that decreases file size tremendously, but increases pixilation the more the image is compressed. 

• Ensure the images you use are high quality and not pixelated.
• For high quality free images, source images from the Monash Brand image and illustration banks, otherwise you can use royalty and copyright-free images via Unsplash or Pixabay.

  

Be mindful of colour blind users and don’t depend on colours alone to communicate meaning in your resources. Lack of awareness around colour blindness means that many visuals – particularly graphs, charts and maps – aren’t designed with colour blind users in mind.

• To avoid producing inaccessible visuals, consider the following:
• Avoid using colour alone to convey information. Use symbols, as well as colours, to convey your message.
• When using colours in charts or graphs, consider using textures as well.
• Avoid colour combinations that are indistinguishable for some colour blind users (e.g. red and green, blue and purple, light green and yellow, etc.)

Use resources that reflect diversity. Avoid using stock images and creating examples that reinforce stereotypes around gender, sexuality, people of colour and people with disabilities.

• When selecting images or taking new photos—whether it’s for slides, websites, or promotional material—aim to represent diversity wherever possible. For example, if using pictures of families or couples, consider including pictures of LGBTIQ+/rainbow families.
• Cultural diversity is similarly important, as stock photos can reinforce stereotypes about people of colour. Media representations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, for example, are consistently negative and it is important to avoid reinforcing those stereotypes.
• Consider gender diversity in images. Stock photos in which all doctors are men and all nurses are women, for example, reinforce gender stereotypes around these professions, which can make women studying medicine or men studying nursing feel isolated or uncomfortable.

Ensure that resources are accessible to students with visual impairments or reading difficulties.

• To make visual information clear to visually impaired students in your classes, describe and explain images, and avoid using images alone to convey meaning (Mortiboys, 2010). Conversely, adding images to text explanations aids in comprehension.
• Wherever possible, avoid putting text in images. When text is necessary (in flow charts, for example), ensure 'alt text' is provided, or produce alternative text-only versions. Students with vision impairment or reading difficulties often use screen reading software, and unless alternative text is provided for images, or text-only versions are produced, visual resources can be inaccessible. Presenting text in images also means that text cannot be resized (to become more readable) without losing quality.
• Always include an image description (alt text) to accommodate individuals with low vision, ensuring that the description accurately portrays the content of the image.

  

The recommended duration for videos should not be more than 6 minutes at the very most. 60% of viewers will watch until the end for short videos of less than 4 minutes. The number significantly increases to 75% when the video is less than 2 minutes.

• Include the duration or run time for audio-visual content.
• Embed video content using the Monash video application Panopto and ensure the closed captioning is enabled (closed captioning is enabled by default).