Summary
Microsoft Accessibility Assistant tools (included in Microsoft Office applications) don't always adequately identify accessibility problems. This document provides a list of items known to fail. See related manual review checklists for Word, Powerpoint, and Excel.
What Accessibility Assistant Will Catch
Word
- Successfully identifies color contrast issues and facilitates corrections
- Usually provides a checklist of images that identifies missing alt text and facilitating manual review of alt text quality.
- Document Access is simply a status indicator; it is successfully assessed, but its value has no bearing on accessibility.
PowerPoint
- Accurately identifies images with missing alt text.
- Flags pages for reading-order review if objects have been added.
- Flags duplicate page or section names.
- Appears to complete most checks successfully.
Excel
- Successfully identifies color contrast issues and facilitates corrections
- Usually provides a checklist of images that identifies missing alt text and facilitating manual review of alt text quality.
- Checks existing table structures for presence of a header row. (Note that it would be difficult to make an Excel table that did not have a header row.)
What It May Not Catch
Word
- Fails to recognize any issues with tables.
- Fails to recognize any issues with document structure.
- Sometimes fails to recognize newly-inserted images. You should manually review any new images you insert
PowerPoint
- Reading order and alt-text checkpoints can be cleared accidentally. You should double-check manually.
- Cannot verify that reading order is as-intended. You should review the reading order on every page.
- Cannot assess quality of alt text for images or charts.
- May not accurately identify contrast failures.
- May not accurately identify merged table cells.
- May not accurately identify missing table headers.
Excel
- Most issues critical for Excel accessibility are not checked by the Accessibility Assistant.