Grackle Slides
Grackle Slides is an automatic accessibility checker for Google Slides. It identifies barriers and provides guidance to improve slide deck accessibility. For ease of use, Grackle Slides has been installed enterprise-wide in the Google Workspace for managed devices.
Important: Grackle is an integration for specific Google Apps, and as such, all usage should follow the Acceptable Use section of the Google Apps Terms of Use & Privacy.
Accessing Grackle Slides
To check your Google Slide deck, open the document and launch the Grackle Slides extension.
- In the Google Slides menu, select Extensions > Grackle Slides > Launch
- Grackle Slides opens in the right sidebar and runs a check
Accessibility Check Results
Grackle Slides gives you information about each check that it runs. Review all Warnings and Failed checks, and fix where needed.
- Green Checkmark = Passed
- Green Checkmark with Exclamation = Passed with Warning
- Red X = Failed
Improve Your Slides
Each section in the sidebar includes several checks. If you get a Warning or Failed check, follow instructions in the Grackle sidebar to take action and fix issues.
Presentation
This section checks that:
- Slide deck has a descriptive title
- Language is set (English is usually set by default)
Slides
This section reviews each slide, checking that:
- Each slide has a unique title
- Empty slides are not used
Tables
If your slide has tables, this section makes sure they are correctly tagged and described. It checks that:
- Tables are tagged correctly with headers
- Cells are not merged
- Cells are not empty
Elements
This section reviews images and other layout elements. It checks that:
- Images and graphics have alt text
- Text boxes are not empty
- Lists are correctly marked as numbered or unnumbered lists
Contents
This section checks for a variety of formatting issues. It checks that:
- Good contrast is used
- Font size is large enough to be readable
- Blank lines are flagged for review
- Style changes are flagged for review
Did you know?
- In the United States, about 55 million people have a disability (src: 2010 U.S. Census).
- About 1 in 5 Americans have some kind of disability (src: 2010 U.S. Census).
- The percentage of people affected by disabilities is growing as our population ages.
- Two popular, free screen readers are VoiceOver (Mac OS and iOS) and NVDA (Win).
- Good accessibility practices can improve the search ranking of your website.
- Form fields without labels can cause problems for some assistive technology users.
- Low color contrast makes content difficult to see, especially for users with low vision.
- Documents linked on a website need to be accessible too (e.g., PDF and Word files).
- Audio content, like podcasts, need transcripts for deaf or hard of hearing users.
- Online videos should be captioned for deaf or hard of hearing users.
- Using HTML tags correctly is very important for accessibility.
- Descriptive link text helps make a website more accessible. Avoid using "Click here" or "Read more."
- A "screen reader" is an application that reads content aloud to a user.
- There is no "alt tag" in HTML. "Alt" is an attribute used with the img tag.
- HTML uses the alt attribute to provide a text description of an image.
- Alt text should describe an image, if the purpose of the image is to convey information.
- If an image is a link, the alt text for the image should explain where the link goes.
- If an image is only being used for decoration, the alt text should be null (i.e., alt="").
- If a table has headers, using header tags (<th>) will make the table more accessible.
- An accessible website is one that can be navigated and understood by everyone.