Date written: Feb 14, 2026.

Background

As everyone is probably aware, the Federal deadline to make publicly facing and publicly serving material accessible (as per WCAG 2.1) is now looming. In particular, this means that since we are a public university, even course material like slides and course webpages need to be WCAG 2.1 accessible by April 24. Hold that thought.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I like to give my students a good set of slides to study at home, to do homework, etc. A lot of academia suffers from a post-COVID malaise, which combined with the proliferation of class recording tools means attendance is dismal at best. One fix for this, is to simply not provide slides and require attendance in class to get access to content. I held out because my opinion always has been that students should still have material to study by themselves. So, my slides tend to be detailed, often visually depicting step-by-step derivations or processes.

Clearly, I will not be able to post such slides from now on because unless automated or AI-assisted, I will not be able to provide screen-reader tags and alt-text for every little item in each of the slides in such a massive deck. That’s unfortunate, but I can probably adapt my teaching methods.

That said, yesterday, I set about examining how I could take one of my simpler slide decks, export it to PDF, and test how well it does with screen readers and WCAG requirements. Adobe Acrobat offers a tool called “Prepare for accessibility” which can run an automated check and provide feedback.

It didn’t go well — in fact, Apple Keynote, my preferred presentation software, was abysmal in this respect.

The Problem

Keynote is a presentation software developed by Apple Inc. It is part of the iWork suite of productivity applications and is available for macOS and iOS devices. Keynote allows users to create visually appealing presentations with various templates, themes, and multimedia integration. iWork suite used to be free for all Apple users, but now there is a paid version called “Creator Studio” that offers additional features and tools for content creation.

I should take a step back and explain why I am talking of Apple Keynote (especially as an engineer, where the stereotype is we will all be working on Microsoft or Windows software, i.e. PowerPoint). I don’t want to wade into that discussion of PC vs. Mac, except to say I prefer:

• well-built devices that always work

• a *nix-based system under the hood and

• widely supported compatibility for travel

So, I am naturally on a Mac as are many mathematicians, developers, and faculty. Back to why Keynote over PowerPoint? After all, one can run PowerPoint on macOS.

Just ONE reason.

Why not Beamer then?

Keynote meshes well with iPads, the iCloud ecosystem, I can use my iPhone as a remote in a pinch, can export to a website, etc. But those are all secondary. It literally was just the fact that LaTeX is natively supported in Keynote that was the deciding factor when I started making lecture slides in Spring 2023 for a course on Signals & Systems.

And I have been happy with that decision. That is ... until now.

To see why, here are two simple exercises, using relatively modest Keynote files: Take this for example and do an Export to PDF.

Exercise 1

Here is how:

File -> Export To -> PDF

Open in Adobe Acrobat and run an accessibility check. It will fail.

Here is how to run the accessibility check in Adobe Acrobat:

All tools -> View more -> Prepare for accessibility -> Check for accessibility.

Okay, let’s do it again; slightly differently. Let's manually go and enable Accessibility in Keynote.

File -> Export To -> PDF.  Then click “Advanced Options” and turn Accessibility to “On.”

Open in Adobe Acrobat and run an accessibility check. It will still fail. As far as I can tell, the Accessibility option in Keynote’s export settings does create tags, but they are improper, malformed and mangled, so Adobe Acrobat struggles with them.

Don’t have Adobe Acrobat? No worries. Let's try something different.

Exercise 2

On Slide #2 in the Keynote file, there is a chart with a scatter plot. On slide three, there is a drawing I made. Go ahead and add alt-text to either of them.

I wasn’t able to (but I can add alt-text to images/photos); let me know how you fare.

Apple Support

After fiddling about for an hour or two (remember I have been using Keynote for years now), I called Apple Support. The call didn’t go that well either.

I basically explained my workflow, turned on Screen share, showed the steps above, and at that point, the gentleman stepped in to tell me that Adobe products are beyond his purview and he can only help me with Apple products (mind you, I am just using Adobe Acrobat to run an accessibility check).

So I asked him what that would be. He told me to open Preview. Great. I invited him to show me how to run an accessibility report in Preview. He couldn’t. He said Preview supports Voice Over; but that was about it.

I explained to him that since Keynote has the option to turn Accessibility on/off in its export setting, Keynote is the one generating the mangled tags that Adobe reads, and those being malformed isn’t an Adobe problem. He asked me whether I am using the free version of Keynote or the newly introduced Creator Studio. I told him it shouldn’t matter since my intent is to comply with federal regulations. He was genuinely curious and asked me if I could run a similar experiment with PowerPoint (and I appreciate this curiosity — at least he didn’t try to blow me off like some other company’s customer service).

Lo and behold, PowerPoint has an entire Menu Ribbon dedicated to Accessibility options and can even run accessibility checks!

At this point he conceded that PowerPoint is ahead of the game in this respect but remarked people have to pay for Office 365, so it’s not in the same league as Keynote. But, as I understand it, even the pro “Creator Studio” version of Keynote doesn’t have the same level of features or functionality with respect to accessibility that PowerPoint does.

We ended the call with him promising to escalate this issue to the relevant team, and also suggesting that I put in feature requests via Apple's Feedback Form. I won't hold my breath, but I did it anyway.

What should Apple do as a responsible company?

At a minimum, these features are absolutely required in every Keynote version:

• Ability to add alt-text for charts, images, drawings.

• Ability to mark objects (e.g. items on the slide, or footer or background) as decorative (do not create tags for them).

• Feature that allows to set the reading order manually.

• Ability to set bookmarks (all documents over 20 pages long need sectioning and bookmarks).

In addition, the Creator Studio could offer:

• Ability to run an accessibility report and suggest fixes for items like lack of contrast, font size, etc.

• AI-assisted alt-text generation.

• AI-assisted reading order generation.

• Suggestions or hints during content creation (i.e. suggest to the user a better color palette to meet contrast requirements).

• Suggestions or hints during content creation in regard to reading order (i.e. difficulties with tables/two-column pages, etc.).

As it stands now, Apple’s Keynote seems to terribly and inexcusably lag behind in helping its users address these issues; especially considering this particular piece of legislation was passed quite a while back.