Presentation checklist

Eight checks, run in this order, on the exported copy. The source doesn't count. On the audited deck, 0 of the 8 passed before the pass and 8 of 8 passed after.

What are the eight checks, in order?

1. Reading order matches the visual order on every slide. Tab through each slide, or read the pane. On the audited deck this was wrong on 17 slides, which is 40.48%.
2. Alt text or a decorative flag on every object. Coverage before was 19 of 173 content objects, which is 10.98%. The pass wrote 154 entries and flagged 313 decorative objects.
3. Contrast measured on every text-on-fill pair and on every fill that encodes a category. Don't judge it by eye. The audited deck had 10 pairs in use, of which 6 passed.
4. Animation reduced to effects that carry meaning, each with a correct still version. 61 effects went to 9.
5. Fonts embedded as a subset, or replaced with fonts the recipient certainly has. Subset embedding cost 1.10 MB against 4.80 MB for the full font.
6. Links and embedded objects resolved, broken deliberately, or confirmed to travel with the file.
7. Thin and pale things checked against the destination: hairlines at 0.75 pt or heavier, gradients and transparencies checked in the exported file, and the deck viewed once in greyscale if it might be printed that way. The audited deck had 23 rules below the floor.
8. The file itself: named so a stranger knows what it is, versioned, under the size ceiling, and opened once from the exported copy on a machine that is not yours.

Why does the order of the checks matter?

Why is the checklist in this order? The size arithmetic on the audited deck shows it most clearly. Images went from 73.30 MB to 11.02 MB, so with the 10.90 MB of everything else the file reached 21.92 MB. Subset font embedding added 1.10 MB for a final 23.02 MB, which is 1.98 MB of headroom under a 25 MB ceiling. Full font embedding would have added 4.80 MB for 26.72 MB. That overshoots the ceiling by 1.72 MB and sends the deck straight back to the shared folder it started in.

The whole pass took the file down by 72.66%. Every step of it was arithmetic you could have done before the first send failed.

Verify (checked 2026-09-08): the 25 MB attachment ceiling used throughout is a common default and not a standard, and mail systems differ. Confirm the limit that applies between your organisation and the recipient's, because the binding constraint is usually the smaller of the two.