Screen share flattened slide access.
Zoom’s accessibility documentation covers keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and captioning. Those features do not address what happens to slide structure and text during screen share: participants experienced shared content as a flat image with no accessible structure.
The heading structure, reading order, and alt text built into a source file did not carry through during screen share. A screen reader could announce that sharing started. It could not read the slide.
Slide-based presentations are among the most common formats in professional, educational, and enterprise settings. If the live moment is inaccessible, the audit result is irrelevant to the people in the room.
Treat this as a live system problem, not a static compliance problem. The access gap sits at the intersection of platform rendering, presenter behavior, and assistive technology configuration, not in any single layer alone.
This changed the scope of the solution. Compliance addresses one layer. Designing for live access requires all three to work in the same moment.
The live moment was the access gap.
Accessibility is often evaluated at rest: a document can be checked, a PDF can be scored. This study tested whether access held during live delivery, after the presenter had already moved on.
Losing access meant guessing at content never verbalized, waiting for chart descriptions that never came, and managing competing audio on top of the cognitive work of just being in the meeting.
When the basic meeting flow removes access at the moment of live delivery, that belongs in the design brief, not an accessibility addendum.
Test access during live delivery.
Retrospective self-report would have missed the real-time access gaps. The study had to run inside Zoom, with assistive technology active and slide content moving.
- Participants
- 3 BLV participants2 Blind, 1 low-vision
- Sessions
- 45 to 60 minutes, conducted over Zoom
- Assistive technology
- JAWS, OCR, screen magnification, text-to-speech, secondary-device screen recognition
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Run the presentation live
The session had to be observed live, not recalled later. Access gaps only appeared while slides were advancing in real time. Participants used their own devices and assistive technology, with the platform, content, and access tools running together.
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Debrief while the experience was fresh
Immediate debriefs while the experience was fresh helped participants name what had just happened: where assistive technology failed, what they inferred, and what they were still waiting for. Recovery strategies often disappear from retrospective accounts.
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Code for patterns across setups
Two researchers coded inquiry and interview recordings independently, then organized findings into a shared pattern map. With n=3, a finding had to hold across assistive technology setups and participant roles before we treated it as credible.
The gap was live slide access.
Seven coded themes became four access gaps. With n=3, these findings were not meant to generalize statistically, but they held across different assistive technology setups, participant roles, and vision statuses.
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Presenter narration became the access path
When shared slides were unreadable through assistive technology, presenter narration became the primary access path. Verbal transitions, slide-change signals, and chart descriptions determined whether participants could follow. Presenter behavior determined how much content passed through the platform.
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Access required layered tool setups
Participants combined tools instead of relying on one stable access path. One routed JAWS and OCR to separate ears; another used a secondary device for screen recognition while listening live. The setups created access, but at the cost of split attention.
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Accessible files did not become accessible meetings
Even when source files had proper heading structure, reading order, and alt text, participants could not access those features through their assistive technology during screen share. The compliance work was done, but the delivery method did not carry it through.
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Advance materials changed the meeting
Advance materials changed the experience from decoding to following. Without them, participants leaned on narration and post-session review. Same meeting, fundamentally different access.
Design for live access.
Five design directions came directly from observed access gaps. They defined where future design work should focus without overstating the scope of a small study.
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Expose slide structure during screen share
Participants could not access slide structure through their assistive technology during screen share. Platform-level direction: expose heading hierarchy, reading order, and text blocks to screen readers during share. What presenters build into source files should remain available during delivery.
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Support presenter narration
When platform-level access fails, presenter behavior becomes the primary interface. Presenter view should surface contextual prompts: describe this chart, signal this transition, announce this section. Verbal accessibility built in, not appended as an optional checklist.
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Reduce competing audio
The issue was unmanaged competition between the live speaker and assistive technology output. Platform design should help manage competing audio during live delivery. That is a design problem, not a participant setup problem.
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Build in advance material sharing
Advance materials materially changed what participants could do in the meeting. This should not depend on presenter discretion. Meeting platforms should prompt hosts to share materials before the session, not rely on informal workarounds.
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Evaluate live, not only at rest
A presentation can be built with proper accessibility markup and still fail during live delivery, when slides are advancing and assistive technology tools are competing for attention. The evaluation frame needs to match actual conditions: content in motion, real-time pressure.
Decision Impact
Live access became the design target.
The question transfers to any live delivery context: enterprise tools, education platforms, AI narration. Can people access content in the moment the system is moving? That requires a different evaluation frame than static compliance.
Expose slide structure during screen share. Add presenter narration prompts. Reduce competing audio streams during live delivery. Build advance material sharing into the meeting workflow.
Test whether a BLV participant can stay oriented while slides advance, the presenter keeps speaking, and their assistive technology is running.
The frame held; test harder next.
Keep: the three-layer access frame
Naming the interaction between platform rendering, presenter habits, and assistive technology configuration made the findings useful beyond this study. Any live, narrated, screen-shared environment has a similar three-layer structure. The framing transfers without pretending a small study generalizes to all of them.
Change: test higher-stakes live meetings
A controlled scenario made the access gap observable, but it did not capture full meeting pressure. The next study should add fast presenters, dense charts, and participants who cannot pause the room.