Microsoft Office Is Not Forgetting the Colorblind (and neither should you)
- JD Solomon
- Aug 11
- 2 min read
Most of us provide too little time at the end to do quality reviews on our PowerPoint, Word, and Excel documents. Less than five percent of us actually do the accessibility check for those with visual impairments and colorblindness.
These are a few ways that Microsoft Office and Communicating with FINESSE make it easier for you to reach everyone with your reports and presentations.
Newer or Emerging Approaches from Microsoft Office
Enhanced Accessibility Assistant (Word, Outlook, PowerPoint), including slide-by-slide notifications for poor color contrast, alt-text issues, and more.
Improved PDF Export Accessibility (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), making documents exported into PDF much more navigable for screen readers. This includes things like heading tags, bookmarks, alt-text for SmartArt/WordArt, table headers, equation tagging, and footnote/endnote links.
Accessibility Assistant Updates in Word that now flag Color & Contrast, Media & Illustrations, Tables, Document Structure, and Document Access.
If you have not used these newer features, explore them under Review|Check Accessibility and then hit the top icon in the accessibility tab. The Accessibility Assistant should pop up in the side pane, including the option to show accessibility fixes on each slide, page, or tab.
Don’t Wait Until the End
I recommend reversing the traditional approach for developing reports and presentations by starting with accessibility. While conceptually intuitive, modifying your approach takes structure and discipline, and runs against many traditional organizational approaches.
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