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Faculty Resources

Making Word Documents Accessible

Microsoft Word

Use the alt text feature in Word to make your images accessible. Put the most detailed information in the Description field.

Screen shot of video captioning tool in YouTube

The Accessibility Checker tool in Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint and Excel) is useful for finding missing ALT text and other common accessibility issues.

Also make sure that your table has header rows. When you insert a table, the properties should look like this:

Screen shot of Table Design tab in Microsoft Word for Mac

PDFs

PDF Accessibility

The current recommendation is to have another format such as HTML, PowerPoint or Word rather than just the PDF. All Word and PowerPoint files should be run through Microsoft's accessibility checker.