Live Captions and Translations Make My PowerPoint Presentations Better for Everyone

PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 makes it easy to accommodate those with hearing impairments or language barriers. These features don’t just improve accessibility – they make presentations clearer and more inclusive for everyone. Fortunately, they are very easy to install.

Offer automatic subtitles in PowerPoint Presentations

I always prefer to make my presentations more inclusive of hearing impaired people in the audience. It also helps everyone follow what the presenter is saying, breaking the barrier of individual speech traits and accents.

Captions & Subtitles is one of the cloud-enhanced features in Microsoft 365 and is powered by Microsoft Speech Services. This means that your spoken words will be sent to Microsoft servers for processing.

PowerPoint can display subtitles or subtitles on the screen in more than 60 languages. Here’s how you can set up real-time subtitles for PowerPoint presentations.

1. In PowerPoint, go to the Subtitles and subtitles section on the Slide show tab at the top.

2. Click on Subtitle parametersand choose the Spoken language and Subtitle language from the menu options.

3. Specify the Mmic you want to use it as the source (if there is more than one microphone connected to your device).

The spoken language is the language you will speak during the presentation, and the subtitle language is the language in which the on-screen subtitles will be displayed for your audience.

In the same menu, you can customize the position where the subtitles are displayed – in a margin below or above the slides or superimposed on top or bottom. You can customize more appearance settings by clicking Subtitle parametersand directing to More Settings (Windows). This will bring you Windows accessibility settings.

In addition, in the Subtitles and subtitles section, you can check the Always Use Subtitles box to have the subtitles always startwhen a slide show starts (it is disabled by default). Of course, you can turn the feature on or off during the presentation. Just click the Toggle Subtitles button on the toolbar below the main slide during a presentation.

Captions & Subtitles depends on a cloud-based speech service, so it is important to have a fast and reliable Internet connection.

Setting up live translation for presentations

If you are presenting to a large audience or a geographically dispersed virtual team, there is a good chance that not everyone in the audience will have the same level of comfort with the language in which you are presenting.

You can make your presentation more accessible by adding live translation as you present. It is a neat and often overlooked derivative of the benefit Subtitles and subtitles functionality.

While installing subtitles, instead of choosing the Subtitle language the same as Spoken languagechange it to any other language that suits your needs. This will add live translation to your presentation without any additional effort. In the screenshot above, I spoke in Hindi and set the subtitle language to English, which worked perfectly.

Give your entire presentation to make sure the translation works for every slide. If possible, get a native speaker to check for you.

Real-time captioning of a PowerPoint slide presentation is a powerful feature and a showcase of what cloud-based speech processing can offer. It only takes a couple of minutes to install and can make your presentation more impactful and earn some brownie points!