Presentation Disaster

Yesterday evening I had to give a presentation to the West Virginia University School of Journalism on Web Accessibility. I had been preparing for this presentation for several weeks and was really looking forward to the challenge. The presentation was based on a web accessibility assessment I had done for the School of Journalism, so I felt quite comfortable with the content and realy had few nerves to speak of. However, almost immediately after I arrived for the meeting, my presentation began to fall apart and in the end, my presentation turned out to be a disaster. This is the story of how it all came down - literally.

My presentation was a short PowerPoint slide show which I put on a key disk. I also had several handouts which I made sure to have extra copies of. Always one to try to be prepared, I took my own equipment - a laptop computer and an LCD projector. When I arrived at the meeting, I discovered that I would not need my laptop or projector because the room already had its own equipment and I would not have had anyplace to set up my equipment. Not a problem until I realized the room was set up with Macs instead of PCs. While Macs and PCs are coming closer to being able to "talk" to each other, I was worried that my Microsoft PowerPoint presentation would not work on a Mac. Luckily the Macs had Microsoft Office installed on them, so my slideshow would work. I had used a Mac about 20 years ago in high school when I was on the school newspaper staff, but Macs have changed a lot in 20 years and they operate a lot differently than a PC. Even something as simple as minimizing a "window" can cause a PC user to fumble around. This is exactly what happened, but that part was actually the least of my worries.

What transpired next was what really destroyed my presentation. Unbeknownst to me, the person who set up my presentation failed to tell me that I was not the only one presenting. I would be presenting after two individuals from the Univeristy's Web Services department. As I am listening to the presentation by Web Services, it occurs to me that my presentation has the wrong audience. I was suppose to present to a class of journalism students that had created a website as a class project. My understanding was that I was presenting to them so that they could fix their website's accessibility issues. What I discovered is that the students themselves have nothing to do with the design of the web site and have no control over making changes. They simply post to the website much in the same way that bloggers post to their blogs. Therefore, my presentation should have been given to Web Services who actually created the website for the journalism students. 90% of my presentation just went out the window. Now, not only would I be fumbling through using the Mac, I was also going to be stumbling through my content to find the 10% that was relevant to the students and try to salvage my presentation.

The two individuals from Web Services stayed to hear my presentation, so I was able to go over everything, but the students were all bored out of their minds and paying more attention to their MySpace pages (it was in a computer lab) than to what I was saying. I had to keep apologizing for covering information that was relevant only to Web Services.

I guess I will find out how I did on Monday. I have to meet with the professor of the class again to discuss the website further. At least this time, I will have a better idea of what to expect.