Accessibility at NYU Libraries

Microsoft Word can be a highly accessible format. Follow the items on this guide to make sure your documents can be used by everyone. Creating an accessible Word document is the easiest way to make an accessible PDF later.

NYU Knowledge Base article about making Word Documents accessible.

Step-by-step instructions and best practices to make your Word documents accessible to people with disabilities.

Summary: Creating accessible documents (MS Office, Google Apps, PDFs) will go a long way toward making the U more accessible to more people. And it doesn't even take a lot of work. (In fact, it can SAVE time!)

This course shows how to make accessible Office documents in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Accessibility expert Glenna Shaw begins by describing what it's like for those with visual, hearing, or movement impairments to experience regular Word and Excel files and PowerPoint presentations. Glenna goes through the essential steps of creating documents that are accessible to all—those using assistive technology and those not—including applying useful headings, formatting tables for ease of use, naming sheet tabs in Excel, using slide layouts and following z-order in PowerPoint, and adding captioning to presentations.

Microsoft Word is the most widely used word processor on the market, and the .docx format is the de facto format for text documents. It is also often used to create PDF and HTML files for websites. There are several things you can do to make your Word Documents more accessible for people with disabilities, and this capability improves with each version of Office.