I had similar problems at work until I realized there were two competing agendas at play. One group wants the slides to be "here's a record of what I talked about so people who didn't make it can read it later", while another wants the slides to be "here's stuff that supports what I'm talking about now". Those are fundamentally incompatible, and it's a bad idea to try to use a deck generated for one purpose to satisfy the other.
One potential solution is two slide decks--one for the presentation and one as a "reading deck", but that's a pain in the neck. Another option we're currently using at work is to go with the Amazon 6-page-paper: write what you're going to talk about, and then the slides are only to support the actual presentation. The paper is the thing people read if they missed the meeting.
I came to the same realization and started putting all the text for the "reading version" in the presenters notes part. The first slide says "If you're reading this on your own, press 'p' for presenter mode" or whatever.
Smart! I just wish PowerPoint had better support for content formatting in the notes. It’s really barebones and hard to edit—more like working with text in an Excel cell than a proper document. (Which kind of makes sense, from their perspective.)
I understand what you're saying and agree that slides with more than a little text are distracting.
For many years, even before becoming aware that the approach had a name, I've always made slides for my presentations contain only a few words, and, for the most part, no images.
Years ago, my dad's hospital had a rule that the head of the department had to review all slides before you gave a presentation at a conference. The department heads had one consistent rule: they had to be able to view your slide without putting it in the projector and tell what it said. Worked pretty well: you can imagine how big and limited the content would have to be to be able to view it on a slide with the naked eye, and it kept people from filling slides with bullet points.
David Ogilvy said 'You have to attack people through the eyes and the ears' or something along those lines when referring to text on flip overs and what you say. As in, the spoken and written text needs to be exactly the same in order to land the message. If you speak different words than are written, he says, you are doing it wrong.
I don't know if I agree with text vs no-text, but I do feel what Ogilvy says about this subject: it is so distracting when a speaker uses different words than his slides, even if ever so slightly. I also love the sticky image of 'attacking through the eyes and ears'. Again, not 100% sure these are his exact words.
I used to think that the best presentations are those where the slides are text only and the speaker just reads the text out aloud.
Just repeating the text of the slides verbatim
Because then I can download the slides at home, read them for myself, and do not miss anything. If the speaker would say anything important that is not written on the slides, I would actually have to go to the presentation, and am annoyed when they talk too slowly and angry that I cannot stay home.
Although my perspective is changing. Now I have glasses and cannot read as fast as I used to. And nowadays there are HD video recordings. With a video recording it does not matter how the presentation is done. In any case I could stay home and watch the recording at 2x speed
Slides with images and no text are a nightmare for non visual person like myself. I see text: I remember text. I see image: I remember exactly nothing.
Even better: when you want them to listen to you, use the "blank" shortcut (B key on Macs using Keynote). The screen goes blank (black), and then they look at you for explanation.
Source: presented 600+ times in front of audiences of all types and size.
They read the text.
Slides that are non-self-explanatory images, _require_ the audience to listen to the speaker.
Try it. Put two circles on the screen and see what people do. They look at you for explanation.