Word

You can find the Accessibility Checker in the Review tab.

Once opened, the Accessibility Assistant will appear to the right of your document. This assistant will automatically report any issues that it detects.

There are two primary ways to modify alt text in Word.

1. Right click an image and select “View Alt Text.”
2. In the accessibility assistant, you can click the “Missing alt text” error and it will let you go through each image that doesn’t have alt text and add it.

Word allows you to generate alt text for your images automatically. This feature is a good place to start (especially if you are including charts in your Word document) but will often generate alt text that isn’t helpful or is too verbose.

Alt text should primarily focus on usability and avoid flowery descriptions. Be direct and to the point, and don’t hesitate to mark images as decorative if their inclusion isn’t critical to understand your material.

For images of text, alt text should simply be the text in quotation marks. Though try to avoid images of text whenever possible.

See our suggestions on how to make good alt text on the Accessible Content Guide page.

The easiest way to organize your documents is to use Word’s style bar on the home tab. You can pop this bar out by pressing the popout button, or with the keyboard shortcut (Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S on PC, or Shift+Option+Command+S on Mac IOS):

A common misconception is that these styles only affect how your text looks, but using these styles also will make your documents much easier to navigate.

First, configure how your headings look so they fit your document. You can do this by right clicking the heading and pressing modify:

Then, once your headings look good to you, just left click on heading whenever you start on a new section. You can also use the shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+1 or Command+Option+1 for level 1 headings, Ctrl+Alt+2 or Command+Option+2 for level 2 headings, and so on. Headings function like an accordion; a level 2 heading will belong to the most recent level 1 heading so make sure to always use a level 1 heading first.

Once you have headings, students can easily jump between them. To add even more navigational ease, you can also link to your own headings.

Tables generated within Word are automatically accessible, but there are a few things you should keep in mind when using tables.

• Avoid splitting or merging cells. Splitting and merging cells can make tables unintuitive for screen reader users. Consider putting information like titles and footnotes outside of the table instead of in a split cell.
• Be aware of your headings. Heading cells are the cells at the top or side of a table that provide context, and they are necessary for assistive technology to interact with tables properly. Word will default to making the first row and first column of the table into heading cells, but this can be adjusted in the table design tab that will appear in the quick access toolbar while a table is selected.
  
  
  
  Under table style options, you can use the first four checkboxes to determine which cells will be your heading cells. “Header Row” will make the first row into a heading while “Total Row” will make the last row into a heading. “First Column” and “Last Column” will make those columns into headings as well. These options can be mixed and matched.
  
  Word’s Accessibility Assistant will not always know if your headings are correctly located, so this is a good thing to check manually.
• Tables should only be used as tables, not as visual design elements. If you want to precisely position text in your document or add borders around it, consider inserting a text box instead of a table.