Accessibility

Most presentation tools ask you to push pixels: drag a text box, choose a font size that fits, nudge the title until it aligns with the bullet, etc.

Typedeck asks you to do none of that. You just drop in your words or images or other content, and the app handles the design.

We think this is a better way for everyone to make slides. And we think it’s particularly helpful to the people for whom pixel-level design work is hardest.

Why Typedeck is more accessible than other presentation apps

Simply put, Typedeck allows people who can’t—or simply don’t want to—do visual design work to produce polished and professional slides.

Every built-in theme meets WCAG 2.1 AA contrast standards: 4.5:1 for body text and 3:1 for large headings. You don’t have to check; the product already does that work for you. Compliance is the floor, not the finish line.

What works today

Typedeck supports the macOS accessibility features below. We’ve tested each of them ourselves, and we’ve tried to be specific about where support is strong and where it still needs work.

VoiceOver

The editor, thumbnail sidebar, content-type picker, content cards, presentation mode, and shape editor are all reachable with VoiceOver. Each thumbnail announces its slide number, title, and any active warnings. Block editors, toolbar buttons, and the shape editor’s tools and color swatches all have descriptive labels.

Some rough edges remain. The rendered slide preview is primarily visual content—themes, charts, layouts—and VoiceOver naturally skips much of it, as it would in any presentation tool. We’re also still smoothing out a few places where focus regions trap navigation longer than they should. If you find one, please tell us.

Voice Control

Every interactive element in Typedeck has a name that Voice Control can recognize. Commands like “Click Theme Gallery,” “Click Rectangle Tool,” or “Click Slide 3” work as expected. Because Voice Control reads the same accessibility information as VoiceOver, anywhere VoiceOver works, Voice Control works too.

Reduced Motion

Turn on Reduce Motion in System Settings and Typedeck stops animating. Sidebar transitions, build reveals, slide transitions, and the small movements that accompany state changes all become instant. There are no surprise animations and no parallax effects. The presentation experience remains the same, just without the motion.

Dark Interface

Typedeck’s editor chrome—toolbar, sidebar, panels, and menus—adapts to your macOS appearance preference. You can also override that preference within Typedeck’s settings. Slide content uses theme colors independently, because slides need to look the same when projected on a wall regardless of the editor appearance you prefer.

Differentiate Without Color Alone

Charts in Typedeck don’t ask you to rely on color alone. Multi-series line and area charts use distinct dash patterns and point shapes—circles, squares, triangles, diamonds, pentagons—so two series remain distinguishable even if they appear similar in color. Legends show the matching shapes, not just colored dots. Drop indicators include plus and x-mark symbols in addition to color. Theme palette previews are numbered.

Pie charts and bar charts rely more heavily on position and labels, but we don’t yet overlay value annotations on every slice or bar. That’s on the list.

Sufficient Contrast

Every built-in theme is designed to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards: 4.5:1 for body text and 3:1 for large headings. Our 20+ themes were built to those targets from the start, not retrofitted later. The editor chrome uses macOS system colors, which adapt to your appearance preference, including high-contrast variants.

Where we’re not there yet

There are two big accessibility features on our roadmap:

Larger Text is not yet supported in the editor chrome. If you’ve increased your macOS text size for accessibility, Typedeck’s UI labels will not currently scale with it. Slide content has its own auto-sizing system that always fits the canvas, but the editor’s controls still use fixed point sizes. We’re working on that.

Image alt text also doesn’t yet have a dedicated workflow. Right now, image descriptions live in the surrounding text. We want to add a first-class alt-text field for every image so screen readers in PDF and HTML exports can describe images properly.

If something is broken, please tell us

Making software accessible is an ongoing process, and it gets better by listening to the people who actually use it. If you run into a VoiceOver issue, find an unlabeled control, or notice an animation that slips past Reduce Motion, please write to us. We’ll fix it—not eventually, but in the next release.

Email michael@typedeck.app with what you were trying to do and what happened. Thank you.