By editor 
Most teams pick a slide tool without thinking about accessibility, then find out the hard way that it matters. Between the two, PowerPoint gives you more built-in help. It ships with an accessibility checker and, on Windows, a reading order pane, so problems surface while you are still working. Google Slides can produce an accessible deck too, but more of the checking falls to you or to an add-on.
That choice usually gets made on other grounds entirely, what the company already pays for or what the client sent over, and it holds until someone asks whether the deck works with a screen reader. The difference is not in what each tool can achieve, since a careful author can build a good deck in either one. The difference is how much help you get along the way and what survives when the deck ships to present.
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Does Google Slides have a built-in accessibility checker?
No. Google Slides has no built-in accessibility checker. To run automated checks, you install a third-party add-on (Grackle Slides), which scans the deck, flags issues, and walks you through the corrections. PowerPoint has a checker built in, under Review then Check Accessibility.
The gap is friction rather than capability. A built-in checker sits one click away and gets used. An add-on has to be found, installed, and sometimes cleared by IT first, which is enough to stop many teams from ever running a check at all.
What accessibility features does PowerPoint have that Google Slides does not?
Five, mainly. And each one automates something you would otherwise have to do by eye.
- A built-in accessibility checker. It runs from the Review tab and covers slide titles, alt text, color contrast, table structure, and reading order, among other checks.
- A Reading Order Pane. It numbers every object in the order a screen reader will announce it, and you drag to reorder. One caveat: this pane is Windows only. On Mac and on the web you use the Selection Pane instead, which lists objects in reverse.
- Marking objects as decorative. Objects with no number in the Reading Order Pane are skipped, which is how you hide background shapes from a screen reader.
- Set as Slide Title. When the checker finds a slide with no title, you can promote an existing text box into the title placeholder directly from within the checker.
- A tagged PDF export. On Windows, go to File → Save As → PDF, click Options, and tick “Document structure tags for accessibility.” On Mac, choose “Best for electronic distribution and accessibility” in the save dialog instead. Our guide on making PowerPoint ADA compliant covers where this sits in the export flow.
Where does Google Slides do better than PowerPoint?
In sharing and in live collaboration. Slides can produce an HTML view of a presentation, which screen reader users often find easier to read than the slide canvas, and it has an accessibility menu you can reach by shortcut. Alt text is built in and takes just one keyboard command.
There is a quieter advantage too. Because everyone edits the same live file, accessibility fixes stay fixed. Nobody is emailing around version four while version three, with the corrected reading order, sits in someone’s downloads folder. In a team where several people touch the same deck, that is worth more than it looks on a feature list.
Which one exports a more accessible PDF?
PowerPoint, and by a clear margin. Its export carries document structure tags into the PDF when you select the right option, so headings, lists and reading order arrive intact. PDFs exported from Google Slides may not retain accessibility features such as semantic structure and reading order, and the tags a screen reader depends on can simply be absent.
This matters more than it sounds. Most decks do not stay decks. They get posted to a course page, attached to an email, or filed as a board record, and they get posted as PDFs. A deck that was accessible in the editor can arrive at its audience stripped of everything that made it so, and nobody involved will necessarily notice.
What do both tools still leave to you?
Everything that needs a human eye. A checker can make sure alt text isn’t missing, but not that it is helpful, and that passes every automated test there is.
Both also leave you to judge link text, color contrast, and whether a slide reads in a sensible order rather than merely a consistent one. Complex tables are a limit in both, since neither gives you a way to make merged or split cells work properly for screen readers. And in both, building slides from proper layouts instead of free-floating text boxes does more for screen reader users than any checker will.
Choosing between them
If you are starting fresh and accessibility is a real requirement, PowerPoint gives you the shorter path. If your team already works in Google Workspace, stay there, budget for an add-on, and be deliberate about how you export.
Either way, the tool is the easier part of the problem. The harder part is volume. A department producing course decks, board packs, or conference slides every week will not fix accessibility one file at a time, which is where PowerPoint accessibility services earn their place.