Depends. Sometimes people write slideshows for internet sharing, in which case they're crappy presentations but text-heavy enough to be effective. Netflix's classic "Culture Deck" is a decent example there.

But the ones that are good for presentations--that is to say, visual interest hooks, not the info being repeated--yeah, not great unless they include an audio track or something.

Edit: this one's somewhere in the middle.

You really aren't. I have never made it through more than about 10 or 15 slides in a deck, and this was no exception.

The text version of a talk, however, can be a wondrous thing, and here's a great example: http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm

I didnt even realize it was a slideshow. No arrows or icons you can click to go to the next/previous slide and nothing on the website saying its a slideshow.

Thanks for your comment. After I read it I went back and clicked an arrow key and the cubeshow started.

This one was maybe 15% useless. Most slides made sense without the audio.

Slide-size chunks of information can be a really good format.

It's literally unreadable on my Nexus 7. For some reason a bunch of slides render empty, the ones that do render load really slowly and often stop part way through rendering leaving partial text that is occasionally readable.

Depends on the slides really - you're right though some of them need their context to be meaningful. Doesn't have to be audio a scrollable transcript could suffice.

I agree. Transcript without the slides, almost as good as both. Just slides withouyt transcript or audio, shit sandwich.

nope. Even worse are ones that don't indicate visually what they are and I stare at the screen for 20 seconds waiting for it to finish loading and wondering why my scroll wheel isn't working.