Translate Alt Text in Google Slides: Accessibility for Multilingual Decks

Short Answer

Slide Buddy translates the visible text layer of your deck plus speaker notes. Alt text is not translated in the current version — you have to update it manually in the translated copy.

If your deck will be used by screen-reader users, consumed by deaf-blind audiences via Braille displays, or needs to meet WCAG 2.2 AA / Section 508 / EN 301 549, plan for a 10–30 minute manual alt-text pass per deck after translation. The rest of this article walks through why, what to fix, and a checklist you can actually use.

Why Translating Alt Text Matters

Alt text (short for "alternative text") is the description attached to images, charts, icons, and shapes that assistive technologies read aloud. A screen-reader user who can't see the image relies entirely on alt text to understand what's on the slide.

When you translate a deck from English to, say, Portuguese, the sighted experience shifts to Portuguese but the screen-reader experience stays in English unless you do something about it. That creates three problems:

• Broken comprehension. A Portuguese-speaking blind user hears "chart showing Q3 revenue growth" read in English while the slide is in Portuguese. The language switch is jarring and often not intelligible at all if the user doesn't speak English.
• Accessibility-standards violation. WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 3.1.2 requires content language to be programmatically identifiable. Mixed-language alt text can fail audits for EN 301 549 (EU public-sector accessibility), Section 508 (US federal), AODA (Ontario), and most corporate accessibility policies.
• Search and indexing noise. Some enterprise search tools index alt text. Mixed-language alt text fragments your search surface.

What Slide Buddy Translates vs. What You Update Manually

How to Add Translated Alt Text in Google Slides

1. Open the translated deck (the copy that Slide Buddy processed).
2. Click an image, icon, or shape.
3. Open the alt-text dialog. Right-click → Alt text. Or keyboard: Cmd+Option+Y on Mac, Ctrl+Alt+Y on Windows/ChromeOS.
4. Write a short description in the target language. Aim for one clear sentence. Describe what the image conveys, not its visual style. Bad: "blue bar chart." Good: "Bar chart showing Q3 revenue grew 18% in EMEA."
5. Mark decorative images as decorative if they're pure visual filler. In Google Slides, leave the alt text empty for decorative shapes; screen readers will skip them.
6. Repeat for every non-decorative image and shape.
7. Rename the file. File name in target language. Screen readers announce file titles.

Rough budget: ~30–60 seconds per image for a bilingual user. A 40-slide deck with ~15 meaningful images typically takes 15–20 minutes to do properly.

Multilingual Accessibility Checklist

Run through this after Slide Buddy finishes translating. It covers the differences between the source and target decks that affect accessibility.

• ☐ Alt text on every meaningful image, icon, and shape is in the target language.
• ☐ Decorative images are explicitly marked as decorative (empty alt text).
• ☐ Speaker notes are in the target language (Slide Buddy handles this, but verify).
• ☐ File name is in the target language.
• ☐ No images contain untranslated source-language text. If they do, re-create using native Slides text boxes on top of the image, or swap the image for a target-language version.
• ☐ Color-contrast ratios are verified for the target language. Some languages use different fonts that render thinner or thicker; a 4.5:1 ratio in English might drop to 4.0:1 in Arabic if you changed the font. See how fonts are preserved during translation.
• ☐ For RTL languages (Arabic, Hebrew), reading order in the slide matches the visual RTL flow. See RTL translation notes for Arabic and Hebrew.
• ☐ Text is not being cut off due to language expansion. See how to fix text overflow after translation.
• ☐ Closed captions on embedded videos are available in the target language.
• ☐ Screen-reader test passed. Open the deck in Present mode with VoiceOver (Mac), NVDA (Windows), or ChromeVox and confirm every slide reads cleanly.
• ☐ Deck title and document language setting (File → Language) are set to the target language so assistive tech knows which voice to use.