In this tutorial, Joe Houghton demonstrates how to activate PowerPoint's automatic captioning/subtitling feature to improve accessibility during virtual presentations on platforms like Zoom or WebEx. He walks through the Slideshow menu to check the "Always Use Subtitles" box, selects subtitle language, and optionally specifies a microphone source. He explains the two subtitle placement options—"Bottom Overlay" (subtitles appear over the lower part of the slide) and "Below Slide" (creates a black bar beneath a slightly reduced slide). Houghton then shows how to configure the slideshow mode to "Browsed by an individual," which keeps the PowerPoint window maximized without taking over a second monitor, allowing other applications to remain visible. He demonstrates the live transcription appearing at the bottom as he speaks and shows how to turn subtitles off by pressing Escape and unchecking the subtitle option. The video provides practical tips for multi‑screen setups and accessibility considerations for presenters.
Chapters
Here's a little tip for everybody who is using PowerPoint to present on Zoom or WebEx or anything like that, and this tip is just to show you how to enable the automatic captioning or subtitling, which will bring up your words as words written on the page for people who perhaps are hard of hearing or have other accessibility issues. So I've got a recent webinar that I did up on the screen. You can, you can see it here, and you go up in the PowerPoint menu here to the Slideshow option, and this option here always use subtitles, you check that box. You've also got some settings here, so you can decide what language you want your subtitles to come up into. If you want to specify the microphone to be used, you can do it here, but otherwise it'll just default to your normal microphone that you have on the system. And then where do you want the subtitles to appear? So, bottom overlaid will have the slide know, as normal in full screen, and then we'll overlay the subtitles over the top of the bottom part of the slide. I normally use Below Slide, which makes the whole slide a little bit smaller and gives you about 2 centimetres or so of black underneath the slide, and then the subtitles come up there. So I'm going to leave those settings as they are, and then if I maximize the screen now. The other thing is, yeah, um, set up slideshow. If you present by a speaker in full screen, when you're in PowerPoint and you press on the full screen option, the present option, if you're on one screen, it just fills the whole screen. If you're on 2 screens, you go into presenter mode on the second screen as well. And if I find that if I have other windows open, if I'm doing a course or whatever, they all disappear. So a little trick here is to choose this one, Browsed by an individual, and that will keep your PowerPoint slides maximised but only in the current window. So that means that if you've got, say, a second screen, you can have other things open on the other screen as well, which I find is really, really useful when I'm doing this. So I'm going to set that to Browsed by an individual and OK. And now you see, even if I make this a little bit smaller, say I make this PowerPoint window a little bit smaller, now when I say Present down here, yeah, you can see that the window is maximized, the slide is maximized to the window, but it's not taking over my entire screen and my second screen. And you can also see at the bottom As I'm speaking, the automatic transcription is bringing up the words for people. And if you want to turn off the transcription, you can Escape and come back into here and just turn off Always Use Subtitles. So I hope that was useful, and best of luck with your presentations.
