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Effective Communication

Garrick Aden-Buie & Silvia Canelón

Professional, Polished, Presentable

1

Effective communication
has the power to:

  • capture the attention of your audience
  • convince others of your findings
  • help you teach more effectively
  • reach a broader audience
2

How does xaringan already help us build effective presentations?

Check Square  Use the right markup for your presentation’s structure

Check Square  Stick to widely used & open file formats

 Make "accessible" your default mindset

 Design for the mode of delivery

 Use clear and simple figures and graphics

 Write clearly

Guidelines from Making Scientific Content More Accessible
by Goring, Stack Whitney, Jacob, Bruna, and Poisot

3

Make "accessible"
your default mindset

We communicate effectively when we make our work open and accessible to a broad audience

Principles of inclusive design

  • Recognize exclusion
  • Solve for one, extend to many
  • Learn from diversity

2.1 Make “accessible” your default mindset
Figure from the Inclusive Design 101 Toolkit by Microsoft

4

Recognizing exclusion helps us call on our humanity and powers of empathy

By designing for someone with a permanent disability, someone with a situational limitation can also benefit

By putting people at the center of our design process we learn from diverse perspectives and experiences

Design for the mode of delivery

Slide presentations require different design considerations than papers or posters

Design content with fewer and more focused details

We don't have to format a
slide presentation like a paper

Design tips:

  • Use context-relevant visual aids to help communicate your message

  • Focus attention and include only the most relevant details

  • Unify your content by maintaining consistency in layout and structure

2.2 Design for the mode of delivery
Better Presentations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks by Jonathan Schwabish

5

In practice: Using visual aids

Ex. slide: not goodSlide containing only plain text provided in paragraph form and going across the entire slide

Ex. slide: goodText has been moved to the left of the slide and an image has been inserted next to it on the right side

Ex. slide: betterText remains on the left of the slide but now the image is a background image taking up the right side of the slide fully and without interfering with the text

  • Avoid writing a "wall of text," break up the content

  • Add a visual aid if it will help carry the message

  • Turn your visual into a larger background image

  • If your text overlaps with the background image, consider using CSS styling to give your text a background for contrast

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In practice: Focusing attention

Ex. slide: okParagraph text on the left of the slide and a background image on the right

Ex. slide: goodParagraph text has been removed of unnecessary wording and organized into bullet points. Background image remains on the right.

Ex. slide: betterThe bullet point list of text now has some words highlighted with a bold blue font face for emphasis, Background image remains on the right.

Ex: good, alternativeThis alternative layout has no background image, but the bullet points are larger and appear incrementally with each click.

Ex: better, alternativeThe large bullet points that incrementally reveal remain but now have select words highlighted for emphasis with a bold blue font face.

  • Structure your text into smaller pieces and eliminate extra text

  • Emphasize important words or phrases with text formatting

  • Use incremental reveals to control the timing of content

    • Note: Provide a version of your slides without
      incremental reveals for screen readers users
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In practice: Unifying your content

Layout

  • Be consistent in your use of content classes

  • Place text and images consistently between slides

  • Balance content so that the slide is not too full

Structure

  • Use headings and lists to provide hierarchy and organization

  • Use color, font size, and
    font type consistently

  • Use a similar style or theme of images or photographs

8

Use clear and simple figures & graphics

Complex images and figures can be difficult for:

  • your audience to process during your presentation

  • you to describe out loud as you are presenting

  • you to describe with alternative text (alt-text)

  

  

2.4 Use clear and simple figures and graphics

9

  • complex images can direct the audience attention away from your main message

  • complex images are harder to describe with alt text, which is necessary to make the image accessible to screen readers

Write clearly

Engage a broad audience with clear language

  • Provide descriptive slide headings

  • Introduce and define abbreviations

  • Define field-specific terminology

  • Write to an audience outside of disciplinary
    silos and even outside of academia

2.7 Write clearly

10

In practice: Writing clearly

From Web Accessibility in Mind

  • 8th grade reading level if targeting a broad audience
  • 12th grade level for an educated or specialized audience

From The A11Y Project

  • Audience between the ages of 12 and 15 years old

Let's check the readability of our lemur content!

11

We are finished with this scene!

 Use the right markup for your presentation’s structure

 Stick to widely used & open file formats

 Make "accessible" your default mindset

 Design for the mode of delivery

 Use clear and simple figures and graphics

 Write clearly

materials/act-02/04-effective-communication

12

Example slides start here

All slides use example text from the Duke Lemur Center site

13

Visual: Not Good

Meet the critically endangered blue-eyed black lemur (Eulemur flavifrons), a crowd favorite here at the DLC!

Blue-eyed black lemurs are the most distinctively sexually dichromatic of all the lemurs. Males are black with blue eyes, whereas females are orange-brown with blue eyes.

Hailing from the tropical subhumid forests of northwestern Madagascar, these rare lemurs are among the most threatened primates on Earth.

Travel back to the Using visual aids slide

14

No use of slide or content classes

Demo

Use of name: visual-not-good

---
name: visual-not-good
<slide content>
---

The name can then be used for internal linking like in the slide that brought us to this one

[Example slide: not good](#visual-not-good)

Visual: Good

Meet the critically endangered blue-eyed black lemur (Eulemur flavifrons), a crowd favorite here at the DLC!

Blue-eyed black lemurs are the most distinctively sexually dichromatic of all the lemurs. Males are black with blue eyes, whereas females are orange-brown with blue eyes.

Hailing from the tropical subhumid forests of northwestern Madagascar, these rare lemurs are among the most threatened primates on Earth.

Black lemur with black fur and blue eyes

Travel back to the Using visual aids slide

15

  • .pull-left[] and .pull-right[] classes

  • image inserted with knitr::include_graphics()

  • fig.alt= code chunk

Visual: Better (sometimes)

Meet the critically endangered blue-eyed black lemur (Eulemur flavifrons), a crowd favorite here at the DLC!

Blue-eyed black lemurs are the most distinctively sexually dichromatic of all the lemurs. Males are black with blue eyes, whereas females are orange-brown with blue eyes.

Hailing from the tropical subhumid forests of northwestern Madagascar, these rare lemurs are among the most threatened primates on Earth.

Travel back to the Using visual aids slide

16

  • .pull-left[] and .pull-right[] classes

  • image inserted using:

    • background-image: url()

    • background-position: right

    • background-size: contain

Focus: Ok

Meet the critically endangered blue-eyed black lemur (Eulemur flavifrons), a crowd favorite here at the DLC!

Blue-eyed black lemurs are the most distinctively sexually dichromatic of all the lemurs. Males are black with blue eyes, whereas females are orange-brown with blue eyes.

Hailing from the tropical subhumid forests of northwestern Madagascar, these rare lemurs are among the most threatened primates on Earth.

Travel back to the Focusing attention slide

17

  • .pull-left[] and .pull-right[] classes

  • image inserted using:

    • background-image: url()

    • background-position: right

    • background-size: contain

Focus: Good

Blue-eyed black lemurs are:

  • sexually dichromatic: males are black with blue eyes and females are orange-brown with blue eyes

  • native to the tropical subhumid forests of northwestern Madagascar

  • rare and among the most threatened primates on Earth

Travel back to the Focusing attention slide

18

  • .pull-left[] and .pull-right[] classes

  • image inserted using:

    • background-image: url()

    • background-position: right

    • background-size: contain

  • use of an unordered list with dashes -

Focus: Better

Blue-eyed black lemurs are:

  • sexually dichromatic: males are black with blue eyes and females are orange-brown with blue eyes

  • native to the tropical subhumid forests of northwestern Madagascar

  • rare and among the most threatened primates on Earth

Travel back to the Focusing attention slide

19

  • .pull-left[] and .pull-right[] classes

  • image inserted using:

    • background-image: url()

    • background-position: right

    • background-size: contain

  • use of an unordered list with dashes -

  • use of CSS classes to highlight text with a blue bold face

Focus: Good (sometimes), alternative

Blue-eyed black lemurs are:

  • sexually dichromatic: males are black with blue eyes
    and females are orange-brown with blue eyes
20

Focus: Good (sometimes), alternative

Blue-eyed black lemurs are:

  • sexually dichromatic: males are black with blue eyes
    and females are orange-brown with blue eyes
  • native to the tropical subhumid forests of
    northwestern Madagascar
21

Focus: Good (sometimes), alternative

Blue-eyed black lemurs are:

  • sexually dichromatic: males are black with blue eyes
    and females are orange-brown with blue eyes
  • native to the tropical subhumid forests of
    northwestern Madagascar
  • rare and among the most threatened primates on Earth

Travel back to the Focusing attention slide

22

  • use of an unordered list with dashes -

  • incremental list items with -- separator

Focus: Better (sometimes), alternative

Blue-eyed black lemurs are:

  • sexually dichromatic: males are black with blue eyes
    and females are orange-brown with blue eyes
23

Focus: Better (sometimes), alternative

Blue-eyed black lemurs are:

  • sexually dichromatic: males are black with blue eyes
    and females are orange-brown with blue eyes
  • native to the tropical subhumid forests of
    northwestern Madagascar
24

Focus: Better (sometimes), alternative

Blue-eyed black lemurs are:

  • sexually dichromatic: males are black with blue eyes
    and females are orange-brown with blue eyes
  • native to the tropical subhumid forests of
    northwestern Madagascar
  • rare and among the most threatened primates on Earth

Travel back to the Focusing attention slide

25

  • use of an unordered list with dashes -

  • incremental list items with -- separator

  • use of CSS classes to highlight text with a blue bold face

Effective communication
has the power to:

  • capture the attention of your audience
  • convince others of your findings
  • help you teach more effectively
  • reach a broader audience
2
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