Introduction to making Word documents accessible

Do you know about the accessibility features in Office 365? Are you using them to create accessible documents? Have you thought about how you can embed best accessibility practices with Office across your organisation?

Learn the basics of how to make your documents accessible in Word in our free webinar recording. 

Microsoft has embedded a wide range of accessibility-related features in Word. AbilityNet Principal Consultant, James Baverstock demonstrated how anyone using Word can now produce more accessible documents. 

This brief introduction to the accessibility features in Office 365 focussed on how to produce accessible documents using Word and provided some tips on how to get your whole organisation producing more accessible content with Office.

Watch the recording below and download a copy of the transcript and slides. You can also explore answered questions about accessibile documents from our Principal Consultant.

Enhance Your Skills in Word Document Accessibility 

During the webinar, we also provided an overview of various training options designed to further enhance your skills in creating accessible Word documents. These training sessions cover a range of topics, from basic accessibility principles to advanced techniques, ensuring that you can make your documents more inclusive and user-friendly:

Online learning for individuals

• How to create accessible documents and presentations - 31 October

In-house training for your team

• Book in-house team training

eLearning for your whole organisation

• Creating accessible content in Office 365

Q&A

This webinar ran for 45 minutes and included an opportunity to pose questions to the speaker. Questions answered live during the session is featured below and in the downloadable transcript. Find out more about our webinars in our FAQs information.

Q: So what is the difference between subtitles and heading levels?  

JAMES: So subtitles are something that you provide, that would be provided for users who can't hear your content, that would be more for video content. And subtitles are usually providing text in a different language. Heading levels are really just concerned with the structure of the document, the headings within the document.  

Q: Should there only be one H1?  

JAMES: Within document accessibility, it's not strictly necessary to have just one H1 necessarily within a document, so for web pages, usually the advice is to have a single H1. Within a document, you can potentially use H1 for your main heading, the title of the document, and maybe use an H1 for each of the chapter headings. They would be perfectly acceptable. Larger documents might be split up and make sense to have the chapter and section headings again and again with H1. Within a document, you can definitely have multiple H1s. You want to ensure that the heading levels under that are nested in an appropriate way.  

Q: Do the styles transfer over if you can convert the document into a PDF, is it still accessible?

JAMES: Absolutely. This is really important. This is the easiest way to make sure that you're getting as much PDF accessibility as possible, is if you're creating them from Word. If you do things like use correct heading styles for your headings, make sure the lists are, use the List style in Word, make sure the tables are marked properly as tables and so on. All of these things will convert across. So the thing you want to avoid using is Print to PDF because that creates an untagged PDF. As long as you use "save to PDF", or if you have a copy of Acrobat, you may have a "convert to PDF" button, if you use those with your word document, it will create what is called a tagged PDF which takes all that good style information and converts it across to the PDF and makes sure that that sort of information is all available for screen readers in the PDF. So it is really best practice certainly if you're intending to create PDFs from Word documents to get all of the good practice we've been talking about today. You want to do that in the Word documents and then you will get a much more accessible PDF out of it when you save to PDF.  

Q: Are there plans to do a session like this on PowerPoint slides or Excel. Do you have any quick tips? I know we have alternative training about it, but if you have anything brief to mention, that would be great.  

JAMES: AbilityNet offers a full PowerPoint training as well. A lot of the things do apply to PowerPoint that we are talking about. The main difference, a big difference in PowerPoint is in the accessibility checker, you also get a reading order option, which is important to look at, and the Reading Order tool allows you make sure that the elements in the PowerPoint slide appear in the correct order for screen readers. And this isn't as necessary and Word because Word documents tend to be more linear, but because PowerPoint slides are created with different images and text boxes, there's an important reading order option in the accessibility checker which lets you set the reading order for the PowerPoint slide. This is all covered in the training that Annie mentioned that we could do on creating accessibility documents and presentations, so we go into PowerPoint in some detail as well as Word so we talk about the things that are a bit different between the two.  

Q: How can you ensure that floating text boxes are read in the intended order, often they seem to be read in the order they were added instead of the visual order?  

JAMES: Yes, this is a real problem. We go into this in our full Word and PowerPoint training. There, we suggest, instead of using the text box function just to avoid using it, and instead to use borders and shading to create the same effect, visual effect of a text box, but you don't have that problem that it is not out of the content order and potentially appears in the wrong place. So, avoiding using text boxes is one way around this, you can fix it if it is something that you are then converting to PDF and you're more worried about the PDF that is produced at the end of it, then you can also fix the reading order in Acrobat as well, but, generally, we recommend using an — not using a text book function, potentially using borders and shading to achieve the same thing, but we do cover that off in our full document Accessibility Web far.  

Q: Can screen readers read PDFs as well as Word docs?  

JAMES: As long as the PDF is tagged, so it is this thing that we mentioned before that, when you create your PDF, you want to make sure that it's a tagged PDF and a tagged PDF is a PDF that has this metadata that says this is a heading, a list, a paragraph. This needs to be tagged, and then a screen reader can read it in just the same way I was showing for the Word document. You can go in, browse it by heading, you can use screen reader functions on it. So PDF can be an accessible format if a. Unfortunately, it's not often not because people create PDFs that are scans of pages, but PDF can be an accessible format for screen readers if it is created in the right way.  

Looking for the transcript and presentation slides?

You can download the slides for this webinar [PPT].

You can download the transcript for this webinar [DOC]. 

Meet your trainer - James Baverstock

James Baverstock is a Principal Accessibility Consultant at AbilityNet. His role includes carrying out design reviews, accessibility audits, user testing, training and providing in-depth consultancy to organisations on web accessibility and usability.
 
His background includes experience of website management, automated testing systems and consultancy on digital policies and standards. He is accredited with the Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA) and Accessible Document Specialist (ADS) qualifications awarded by IAAP and holds an MSc in Information Systems from City University.

Useful links

• Factsheet: Creating Accessible Documents
• Sign up to the AbilityNet newsletter for more free resources like this webinar!
• Find out about AbilityNet's Digital accessibility services