PowerPoint's structure and the ease of adding content to slides prompts special accessibility considerations. The best way to make an accessible PowerPoint is to keep these in mind as you are first creating the document, as it is common to have to recreate slides otherwise. This page details the PowerPoint-specific accessibility concerns. Be sure to review the issues listed on the Microsoft Office page as well.

This section details the accessibility elements in Microsoft Office that are shared when working with Word and PowerPoint documents. Their respective pages have further details on the issues that are specific to that filetype, and additional resources can be found on the Creating Accessible Documents and Websites page.

This page is a collection of resources regarding the accessibility of Word, PowerPoint, and PDF documents as well as websites, beginning with our pages on the common issues in each type of document.

The page on Office covers the concepts and issues that are present in both Word and PowerPoint documents, while their respective pages cover topics that are unique to that filetype.

Beyond what is mentioned in the Accessible Office page, Word has a few additional accessibility concerns you should be aware of. Also included on this page are some useful formatting tools in Word to deal with these issues as well as how to use the accessibility checker.

What is alt text?

Alternative text (alt text) is text that describes the content of an image that can be read by a screen reader. It's important to consider what elements of the image are important to include in context. A portrait photo of a historical figure may just need that figure's name as the alt text, while a piece of art may need its primary features denoted, and a diagram or graph may need its contents fully described.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0 require four pieces for a video to be considered accessible. In brief, those guidelines are:

The Order Panel is a more visual way to edit the tags in a PDF. It's more intuitive to use than the Tags Panel, but has some limitations. Thus, it should be the first step in checking a document after checking the accessibility and/or tagging it with Make Accessible.

The most straightforward process of correcting tags with the Order Panel is to go through the document twice. The first time, you will check the accuracy of the tags present, and in the second, you will check the reading order.

There are two approaches to creating captions and transcripts in YouTube, captions first and transcript first. Captions first will be the most common process in most cases, but if you're working from a script or you prefer to work in a text editor, you can skip to the Working From a Transcript section.

PDF is a curious case for accessibility. On one hand, it has the potential to be a useful standard for both accessible reading and for printing. On the other, it is rarely utilized in an accessible manner and has many obscure issues and odd behaviors that can lead to problems.