Guidelines for presenters of papers

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Presenters

Timing

It is the speakers' responsibility to prepare their talk to fit within the time frame of 20 minutes, followed by about 10 minutes for questions. It is important to keep to the allotted time - for logistical reasons, as well as out of respect for co-presenters and also for the listeners.

So, keep an eye on the session chairperson regarding timing. Chairs will be instructed to ensure the papers are given in advertised order and to keep strict time. They will display cards indicating that you are close to the end of your time. If necessary, they will show you the red card, indicating that you must stop immediately.

Visual aids

They should be clear, large and visible. A good guide is that overhead projectors (OHPs) or PowerPoint slides have a maximum of 6 bullet points per page and 6 words per bullet point. Select an easy-to-read font. The font size should be 18 or 20 point as a minimum.

Make certain that background and text colour do not conflict (e.g. avoid blue-on-red). Also be sensitive to good and bad colour combinations for people who suffer from colour-blindness. More details are in the Colour section in the information for presenters of posters.

Keep the amount of text per slide to a minimum, so that delegates can listen to your words whilst viewing the slide. Let the slide text complement your words, rather than duplicate them precisely. Keep the number of slides low enough that you do not have to rush through them while delegates are still reading and processing them.

Likewise, handouts should be written in 12-point font or larger. Please bring a few hard copies of any PowerPoint or overhead slides for those who have difficulty seeing even larger fonts when displayed on a screen.

Languages

Presentations may be given in the language of the accepted abstract. If the language is not English we strongly recommend the use of slides in English to facilitate comprehension. If the language is English, we strongly recommend the use of slides in one of the other conference languages:

• Spanish
• Italian
• German
• French.

Media

Acceptable media for the presentation are CD-ROM disks and USB memory sticks.

The presentation room has its own laptop PC with a wireless connection available for speakers to save and test their presentations, and to use for display. Speakers can use their own laptops if they prefer. To avoid compatibility problems, we recommend the latter for Macintosh users, unless they have used a platform-independent application such as PowerPoint to create their presentations.

Access to a wireless internet connection will be available in the building.

Full audio-visual support is available in the presentation room.

Notes for PowerPoint

• Our PCs currently run Windows XP with PowerPoint 2003 and Internet Explorer 6.
• If you want to use our PC to play your presentation:
  • if you have used any specialised fonts (e.g. IPA fonts) in your presentation, ensure that they are 'embedded' into the presentation as you cannot be sure that the PC used to replay the presentation has the same fonts installed as the one you used to create it.
  • to embed fonts, click on 'Tools', 'Options', 'Save' and make sure the 'Embed...' box is ticked when saving your presentation.
  • if you have used sound clips in your presentation, make sure you bring copies of the clips with your presentation.
  • by default PowerPoint does not embed sound clips greater than a certain size, but only creates a link to the original file. This can be changed by clicking on 'Tools', 'Options', ‘General', and changing the 'link sounds' box to a higher value.
  • if you have used video clips in your presentation, you must bring a copy of the clips with your presentation - video clips cannot be embedded into the presentation.

Preparation

At a break before your session, check the room where you will present your paper. Test all of your media (e.g.PowerPoint presentation on CD-ROM or USB memory stick, overhead slides, audio cassettes, CDs) on the relevant equipment in the room to ensure that everything will run smoothly. There will be a technician in the conference area to help.

Chairs and programme organisers

Once the programme has been made public, the ordering of the presentations cannot be changed unilaterally. So, for example, if the speaker in slot #2 cancels, you may fill the empty slot by adding an additional speaker or by holding a discussion session. However, you cannot place an already-scheduled speaker into that slot (say from slot #3 of the same session, or from a later session). This is to avoid the disappointment of conference delegates who may have come expressly to hear a certain speaker in a certain slot as published in the conference programme. Any changes need to be approved in advance by the CLiP programme organisers.

Contact us

For all queries on these guidelines please contact the local committee.