Word Document Accessibility

Styles Do the Structural Work

In Microsoft Word, structure is carried by styles. Applying the built-in Title, Subtitle, Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3 styles is what tells the file that a line is a heading. Making text larger and bold changes only its appearance, and a document formatted that way has no headings at all as far as assistive technology is concerned.

For the principles behind this, including why structure matters and how reading order works, see Accessible Documents. This page covers how those principles are implemented in Word.

Heading levels should descend in order and reflect the real hierarchy of the document. Skipping from Heading 1 to Heading 3 because the smaller size looked better is the most common structural error in word processing, and it is invisible on the page. Where the built-in styles are the wrong size or typeface, the styles themselves should be modified rather than abandoned.

Alternative Text in Word

Word supports alternative text on pictures, SmartArt graphics, shapes, charts, and videos. The description should convey what the object contributes to the document rather than what it looks like, and objects that are purely decorative should be marked as decorative so that they are skipped.

Charts created in Word deserve particular attention. A chart is announced through its alternative text, which cannot reasonably carry a full data series, so the figures behind the chart should also be present in the document, or the description should state the trend the chart exists to show.

Word can propose descriptions automatically. A proposed description is a draft: it is generated from image content without knowing why the image is in this document, and it should be reviewed and usually rewritten before the file is shared.

Tables in Word

A table in Word needs a header row identified as such, so that a reader who arrives in a single cell can be told which column it belongs to. Microsoft's guidance is to add a header row and column headings, and to avoid split cells, merged cells, and tables nested inside other tables, all of which break the relationship between a data cell and its headers.

Tables should also be simple enough to be read one cell at a time. A table that only makes sense when the whole grid is visible at once is usually carrying a layout rather than data, and content arranged that way is better handled with real headings, columns, or separate sections.

Using a table to position blocks of text on the page is a habit worth breaking. It is invisible to a sighted reader and unavoidable for anyone reading the document linearly.

Lists and Link Text

Bulleted and numbered lists should be created with Word's list features rather than typed as hyphens, asterisks, or manually numbered lines, which produce the appearance of a list without the structure. Word's automatic list recognition, which converts a typed hyphen into a list as you write, produces a real list; a hyphen left as a hyphen does not.

Link text should describe where the link goes. Microsoft's guidance is explicit about avoiding text such as click here or see this page, and Word supports adding a ScreenTip to give additional context. Pasting a full web address into a document produces link text that is read out character by character, and it is worth replacing with the name of the destination.

Nested lists should be built with the list features as well, using the indent controls rather than manual spacing, so that the levels are recorded rather than merely drawn. Lists that continue across a page break or around an image often lose their numbering when they are built by hand, which is another reason to let the feature do the work.

Color, Contrast, and Font Choices

Word applies the Automatic setting to font color by default, and Microsoft recommends keeping it, because automatic color adapts when a reader switches to a high contrast display mode. Text colored manually can disappear entirely under those settings.

Color should not be the only carrier of meaning. Items marked as urgent only in red, or table cells distinguished only by fill, lose their meaning for readers who cannot see the distinction and for anyone printing in grayscale. Adding a word, a symbol, or a column resolves it.

Microsoft's practical typography guidance is straightforward: prefer sans serif faces such as Arial or Calibri, use a comfortable size, and avoid long passages in all capitals, in italics, or underlined, since each of those slows reading for people with dyslexia and for many readers using magnification.

Document Language, Title, and Properties

Word records the language of the text, and speech synthesis relies on it to choose pronunciation. A document written in English but marked as another language is close to unusable when read aloud, and passages genuinely written in another language should be marked separately so that they are pronounced correctly.

The document title is stored in the file's properties and is distinct from the file name. It travels with the document, is displayed by many systems, and survives export. Filling it in takes a few seconds and is frequently the difference between a reader knowing what they have opened and not. The author and subject fields are worth completing for the same reason, since repository and search systems use them to describe a file that a reader has not yet opened.

Text Boxes, Floating Objects, and Layout Traps

Text boxes are the most persistent accessibility hazard in Word. Text placed inside a text box sits outside the main flow of the document, so it is easily missed entirely or read at an unexpected point, and it often disappears from exports. Content that matters belongs in the body of the document, formatted with styles.

Floating images and shapes cause a related problem. An object anchored with text wrapping can be encountered before or after the passage it illustrates, depending on how the file is read. Placing images in line with text keeps their position predictable.

Headers, footers, and watermarks are not read in the main flow either. Information that exists only in a header or footer, such as a document reference or a confidentiality notice, should be repeated in the body if a reader needs it.

Comments, Tracked Changes, and Review Artifacts

Documents circulated for review often carry comments and tracked changes, and these are announced by screen readers alongside the text. A document distributed for reading rather than for review should have its changes accepted or rejected and its comments resolved first, so that readers are not working through an editorial conversation.

Where comments are part of the point, as in a document sent for feedback, that is fine. The problem is the final version that was never cleaned up, which is common enough to be worth checking before every release.

The Word Accessibility Checker

Word includes an Accessibility Checker that runs in the background while a document is being written and reports issues as they appear. It reliably catches missing alternative text, tables without header rows, and similar machine-detectable faults, and it is the fastest way to remove a whole class of problems.

What it settles is narrower than it appears. It can tell that alternative text exists but not whether the description is right. It can tell that heading styles are used but not whether the levels reflect the document's real structure. It cannot judge whether the reading order makes sense or whether a table is carrying data or layout.

A clean result from the checker means that the machine-detectable faults are gone. Reading the document through, and checking that its outline makes sense, is what settles the rest.

Accessible Templates

Most organizational documents are produced from templates, which makes the template the highest-leverage place to work. A letterhead, report, or memo template with correct heading styles, adequate contrast, a set document language, and no text boxes standing in for body text produces accessible documents by default.

Fixing templates once also solves the recurrence problem. An organization that remediates individual files is repeating the same corrections indefinitely, while one that corrects its templates changes what everybody produces from that point onward.

Exporting to a Tagged PDF

Most Word documents eventually become PDF files, and the export route determines whether the structure survives. Exporting or saving as PDF from Word carries heading styles, alternative text, table headers, and reading order into the resulting file as tags. Printing to PDF through a print driver typically produces a visually identical file with no structure at all.

The corollary is that an accessible PDF usually starts as an accessible Word document. When a PDF needs correcting, the efficient path is almost always to correct the Word source and export again rather than to repair the PDF. For what happens on the other side of that export, see PDF Accessibility.

Related AssistiveTechnology.org Resources

For the principles that apply to documents in every format, see Accessible Documents. For what happens to a document after it is exported, see PDF Accessibility. For slide material, see PowerPoint and Presentation Accessibility. For what the guidelines are and how conformance levels work, see WCAG Overview. For a general orientation to the subject, see Digital Accessibility, and for further reading across topics, see Resources.

Where a public entity's Word document work is done to meet the Department of Justice's Title II rule for web and mobile accessibility, the required technical standard is WCAG 2.1 Level A and Level AA. WCAG 2.2, the current W3C Recommendation listed in the sources below, is not itself the Title II legal requirement.

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Authoritative Sources

World Wide Web Consortium: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, W3C Recommendation, for the success criteria behind these practices.

World Wide Web Consortium: Guidance on Applying WCAG 2 to Non-Web Information and Communications Technologies (WCAG2ICT), W3C Group Note, informative guidance on reading those criteria for documents.

Microsoft: Make your Word documents accessible to people with disabilities, for the names and behavior of the Word features described here.

U.S. General Services Administration, federal Section 508 program: guidance and training on authoring and testing accessible documents.

Last Standards Review

Last standards review: September 22, 2026. On that date the Word feature names and guidance described here, including the built-in heading styles, alternative text support, table header guidance, hyperlink and ScreenTip guidance, font color settings, and the Accessibility Checker, were verified against current Microsoft documentation, and the standards statements were verified against current World Wide Web Consortium sources.

About This Page

This page provides general educational information about accessible authoring in a word processor. It is prepared by The Accessibility Clinic Inc. as educational information only. It is not legal advice, and it does not guarantee that any specific website, application, document, or product meets a particular standard or legal requirement. Organizations should evaluate their own obligations in light of their specific circumstances and consult qualified counsel when needed. Standards and regulations change; the last standards review date above indicates when the statements on this page were most recently verified against primary sources.