Microsoft Office 365

The Microsoft Help Center provides excellent resources for creating accessible documents within the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem, including: Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Outlook. Each of these editors have a built-in Accessibility Checker that will flag accessibility issues.

• Microsoft Office 365 Accessibility Help Page
• Microsoft Office 365 Accessibility Video Training(s)

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Microsoft Word Documents

The Microsoft Help Center provides excellent resources for creating accessible documents in Word.

• Microsoft Word Accessibility Help Page
• Microsoft Word Accessibility Video Training(s)

• The State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) provides a useful Canvas module on creating accessible Word documents.

Converting a Word Document to a Google Doc

In general, we prefer to start with a Google Doc and convert it to a Microsoft Word document if needed, because  converting the other way (from Microsoft Word to Google Docs) can result in loss of some accessibility features. That said, here are the known issues in converting Word documents to Google Docs, and known workarounds for them if this type of conversion is necessary in your case.

• Microsoft Word documents opened in Google Docs will lose the title field of all image alt text, but the description field of image alt text will be maintained in the conversion. We therefore recommend that you copy the title field of all image alt text on your Word document into the beginning of the description field on that same image before you convert the document to a Google Doc.
• After conversion, table headings will be lost. The color of the table cells will still look like headings, but they will not function as semantic headings for screen readers. There is no known way to work around this issue. For this reason, we suggest that documents with complex tables not be converted from Microsoft Word documents to Google Docs.

Converting a Word Document to a PDF

If your source document is a Microsoft Word document, follow the instructions provided by Microsoft Help Center in this excellent resource for creating accessible PDFs from a Word Document.

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Microsoft Powerpoint Presentations

The Microsoft Help Center provides excellent resources for creating accessible presentations in Powerpoint.

• Microsoft Powerpoint Accessibility Help Page
• Microsoft Powerpoint Accessibility Video Training(s)

The State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) provides another useful Canvas module on creating accessible Powerpoint presentations.

Still Have Questions?

Accessibility is constantly evolving to keep up with emerging technologies, and the information herein is not comprehensive. If you still have questions, please fill out our form. We recommend completing the Canvas training "Accessibility Training: How to Create Content that Works for Everyone" first!