Follow these steps to create Microsoft Word documents that are accessible for people with disabilities and for people who use assistive technology — and more usable for everyone.
Assistive technology can help people access Word documents (and PDF documents you export from Word) when they might not otherwise be able to. Text-to-speech (TTS) tools can read aloud your document, giving you the option of listening to a document rather than visually reading it. Screen readers are a special type of TTS tools that are designed to be usable for people who may not be able to see the computer screen. Screen readers, for example, will read aloud alternative text for images, and they will announce “link” for links to indicate that they are interactive. And people with low vision may use magnification tools to help make things bigger or use high-contrast modes to help make text more readable.
However, in order for assistive technology to work properly, we first need to author accessible Word documents.
Accessibility is important even for people who don’t use assistive tech. For example, if your text has low color contrast, people with low vision may not be able to make out your text. And if you use heading styles to structure your document, it will be easy for you to change the look of your headings all at once later on, or to find and easily jump to that specific section you’re looking for. Also, accessible documents can much more easily and effectively be converted into alternative formats.