The Accessibility Assistant
What is the Accessibility Assistant?
The Accessibility Assistant is a great tool to help build accessible content, but it does not find all issues. All Microsoft document files also require manual verification by a human. The following information shows how it works, issues it can find, and issues that require manual review:
How it works
The Accessibility Assistant uses machine learning and AI to analyze your content and identify potential accessibility issues. It provides suggestions for fixing these issues based on best practices and guidelines.
What the Accessibility Assistant will find
The Accessibility Assistant can help you identify and fix common accessibility issues in your documents, such as:
- Missing Alt Text
- Missing Slide Titles
- No Table Headers
- Text Contrast (The Assistant may not identify all instances where text and background colors are insufficiently distinct.)
The manual (human) accessibility check
Depending on the situation, The Accessibility Assistant cannot help with:
- Colour Contrast: While it can identify some contrast issues, it may not catch all instances where text and background colors are too similar.
- Accurate Reading Order: The Assistant cannot identify the correct reading order of content.
- Language changes:The Assistant does not detect words or phrases written in a different language from the default document language.
- Meaningful Descriptive Links Links like “click here” or “read more”.
- Plain language and reading level.
How to use the Accessibility Assistant
- Select the “Review” menu
- Select the “Check Accessibility” button in the ribbon. The Accessibility Assistant pane will open on the side of your window.
- Review the list of issues to understand the problem.
- Apply the fixes one at a time, making the suggested change if it fits your content and intent.
- After applying a fix, the Accessibility Assistant will update the list of issues.
Enabling real-time feedback
To have the Accessibility Assistant provide ongoing feedback as you edit your document, follow these steps:
- Select the settings option at the bottom of the Accessibility Assistant pane.
- Select the checkbox to "Show accessibility status for the Accessibility Assistant in the Status Bar"