Summary
The Accessibility Checker in Microsoft Office no longer identifies some accessibility issues. This article lists problems it's known to miss, and links to manual checklists for key Microsoft applications.
Body
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
- 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.
Excel
- Most issues critical for Excel accessibility are not checked by the Accessibility Assistant.