Make documents more accessible with Accessibility Checker

- When sharing your documents with others it's always important to take accessibility into consideration, and the accessibility checker in Word 2019 has received some improvements to make this task easier than ever. Let's take a look. So you can have a document open, and as you can see this one is multiple pages containing texts and graphics. To check for accessibility go to 'Review' tab, and there you'll find it accessibility group, check accessibility.

Give it a click, that opens up the accessibility checker over here on the right hand side. What you're going to see is a list of inspection results including errors. You can see missing alternative texts. You can see some of the images down below are simply numbered here in this document, and selecting them will take you to them in the document. Clicking the dropdown will give you some options. Now, in this case we have a logo, the Red 30 logo, it has no what we call "Alt-Text" or description, and by choosing, 'Add a description' those who have difficulty viewing our content, and maybe use a screen reader; the screen reader will read whatever we type for description.

So, those who can't see this logo will get a verbal description of what it is. So we'll click 'Add a description.' It opens up the Alt-Text pane over here. One to two sentences is recommended, but for the sake of time I'm keep this short and sweet, so you get the idea. Notice there is a 'Generate a description for me' and clicking this button will add something. Looks like "Drawing of a face," "Generated with low confidence." I would agree. So we can select all of that and type write over it our own description.

I'm going to type in "Red 30 logo, in red, the word red followed by the number 30 encircled." You get the idea. So with that in there, this is no longer one that appears on our error list of 'Missing alternative texts.' We can go to picture 15. This ones another logo, but it appears down below in the footer area, and in this case probably doesn't need a description it's just decorative, so clicking drop down gives you that option as well.

'Mark as decorative.' It's removed from the list and on we go to the next one. It's this large image, and again we would want to click the drop down, and 'Add a description.' If it's already open here all you have to do is click here, and start typing. We can also try the 'Generate a description for me,' "A person using a computer." That one actually works. Then we can go onto the next one. 'Generate.' You can see how much easier it is, "A group of people looking at a computer." I would agree.

Generating is sometimes very fast and easy, but when it's not, it's good to know we can simply type over what's there. "Two people sitting at a table." And there is picture 18, that's a drone, let's see what happens when we generate. "Close up of a propeller." I'm gonna change the word by double clicking, type in, "drone in flight." There we go. I can take out the description down below, and that's gonna work just fine.

Then we get to the next category. 'Image or object not inline.' If we go back to picture 16, all this means it's not inline with texts. So the order that a screen reader might read the description for this particular image compared the rest of the content might get mixed up if it's not inline with texts, so if the order is important the image goes with text we want it to be inline. This one doesn't matter. If we go to picture 15, picture 1, that can stay right there at the top.

Picture 11, this one we might inline, and when click the drop down you can see we can place inline with texts. Doing that moves it over to the left-hand side. So we might want to adjust things like alignment, etc. But now it's inline with texts. If we move it down in this paragraph for example it will always be in the right order surrounded by the right texts. This will be helpful for screen readers, may not look as nice on our screen on the page. So we can go through each of these doing the exact same thing or just simply ignoring them clicking the drop down, placing it inline.

You can see what the does to our logo up here at the top, moves it over. At anytime we can click undo if we don't need to worry about that. The other thing you'll see with accessibility checker is down below. Warnings about repeated blank characters. Sometimes when there is too many blanks that can mess up a screen reader, so click the drop down, and simply 'Remove blanks,' and it will fix that up. So wherever there were multiple spaces for example they are removed, and that won't interfere screen readers.

That whole category disappears from our checker, and we are down to 'Intelligent Services.' You can see, 'Suggested alternative texts,' was added using 'Intelligent Services' to pictures one, three, and eleven. When were down we can close these up by clicking the 'X' in the top right corner to return to our document knowing that it's more accessible than it was before we started, and making it accessible has become faster and easier thanks to some improvements to the accessibility checker.