Accessibility is a vital aspect of providing information to ensure that anything that you publish is available to the widest range of people. Indeed, for Public Sector Bodies, with a few exceptions, they are required by law to do so for websites and apps since the introduction of the 2018 Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations.
While going back over all old documents may be overly burdensome there is no reason not to embed accessibility friendliness into anything that you create from now on and thankfully Microsoft introduced tools to make that both easy to do and easy to check.
Before we look at any modifications it is worth noting that Word (and some other apps such as OneNote) has a built-in feature called Immersive Reader which allows an individual to change things such as background colour, spacing and whether the words or whole or broken into syllables.
It also offers a Read Aloud mode.
At present, using web-based apps gives even more options such as highlighting different parts of speech (noun, verb, etc.) and changing font size universally, focusing on a single line, and much more.
Hopefully, some of these features will find their way into the desktop apps over time.
So, what things should we consider to make a document more accessible?
Well, for many forms of accessibility the answer may be nothing more than ensuring that you are writing in plain English.
If you have access to Microsoft Editor 
in Word as part of your Office or Microsoft 365 subscription this does a decent job of helping as it checks for a number of elements beyond the standard spelling and grammar familiar to most, such as clarity, conciseness and vocabulary. It is a big fan of the Oxford comma although this can be turned off in the options if that isn’t your thing. I’ll write more about the Editor in a later post.
Ensuring that your document is easy to read also extends to using Styles for headings, sub-headings etc rather than manually changing size, bold and other features as styles are usually picked up by screen readers giving the user a better sense of the flow and structure of the document.
Once you have your document created there is a simple way to check the accessibility which can be triggered from the Review Ribbon->Check Accessibility
This will open a panel showing examples of areas that may need some additional consideration. Most notable for any document that has images will be identifying pictures that don’t have any Alt Text.
Alt Text is what is read by a screen reader when it reaches an image. There are two options, one is that if the image is purely decorative it can be marked as such; the second is that the image should be described in clear detail so that a screen reader user will get as close to the same information as a sighted user.
While we have been looking at Word for much of this the accessibility checker will also provide insight in Excel where Alt Text should also be added to charts to ensure that screen readers present the user with the information they need to make it a valuable addition. This can be done by simply right-clicking on the main chart and selecting Alt Text from the menu.
The Alt Text should be as descriptive as possible to give anyone relying on a screen reader as much of the same information that a fully sighted person will get from looking at the chart.
That principle applies equally to images, try and be as descriptive as possible.
The Alt Text for the image above could be something along the lines of:
Resting on a bench is a teacup and saucer which has a blue Chinese style pattern and contains tea with no milk. Someone has placed 4 buttercups in the saucer.
These simple changes will make your documents much more accessible to anyone who needs to use them and of course, other document creation suites and tools have similar features that you should take advantage of.
