Best Practices - Microsoft Word

Headings have a large and bold font. Use Heading 1, 2, 3, etc. in the Styles section on the home tab to format headings. This formatting makes the content navigable by screen readers and saves time by automatically formatting the selected text.

1. Highlight text or move the cursor to a new line to create a heading
2. Go to the Home tab > Styles > Heading 1 / 2 /3 / etc.
3. Select the appropriate heading level

Emphasis is often created by making the type bold, italic, underlined, highlighted, or a different color. However, these alterations cannot be read by a screen reader. Instead, use Strong to add emphasis. This feature is found in the same section as headers. Strong can be customized to meet your visual appearance needs and will be properly emphasized by screen reading software.

1. Highlight text to change to strong
2. Go to the Home tab > Styles > Strong

Using Arial in 14-point size increases readability on computer screens and mobile devices. Over 90% of vision issues are related to limited sight or partial vision loss. Generally, using a sans serif font and increasing the type size can help these users.

1. Highlight text to change the font
2. Go to the Home tab > Font > Font name dropdown and select a sans serif font, such as Arial
3. Beside the font name is the font size dropdown, set it to an acceptable size such as 14

Unless your document will always be printed, your URLs should be unique, natural language hyperlinks. Long web addresses read by a screen reader are difficult to understand. Using a hyperlink gives an alias to the link with a readable title. For example, the link title "Your class" is better than "www.yourdepartment.youruniversity.edu/yourname/yourclass/randomnumbers."

1. Select a link > Insert tab > Links (dialog box opens)
   OR Select a link > Right-click > Link (dialog box opens)
2. In "Text to display," give a readable name for your URL
3. In "Address," provide the web URL

Use numbered lists if your points are in a sequence of steps. Use bulleted lists if the order does not matter. Do not create the appearance of a list by inserting an asterisk or number and hitting return several times before another asterisk or number. Instead, utilize the built-in formatting functions in Word.

1. Select the Home tab
2. Choose Numbered List or Bulleted List option from the Paragraph group

Alternative text ("alt text” for short) makes images in documents accessible by adding a textual description for pictures, tables, charts, or any visual imagery. For example, a picture of Harry Truman should have the alt text “Harry Truman.” If it is a picture of an atom, the alt text might need to be more descriptive. The key is to think critically about what information a user would gather from the visual depiction. Alt text also stays intact when exporting to HTML or PDF. The steps for creating alt text depend on what you need to add the alt text to.

• Pictures: Right-click > Edit Alt Text > Give description in the box on the right-side panel
  OR Select the object. Select Picture Format > Alt Text
• Tables: Hover over the table to get the cross icon > Right-click on it > Table properties > Alt text tab
  OR Select the table. Select Layout >Table > Properties > Alt text tab
• Charts: Right-click > Edit Alt Text > Give description in the box on the right-side panel
  OR Select the chart. Select Format > Accessibility > Alt Text > Give description in the box on the right-side panel

Accessible tables have a clean structure where headers guide the screen reader to navigate across the table cells. Cells should not be merged or split. On the right are two examples of tables with names and addresses. The first image shows a table with merged cells, which is discouraged. The second image shows proper table setup: headers with the required information below it and the same number of cells in each row. A table should also include alt text.

1. Select the Insert tab > Table > Insert Table
2. To add table headers to the first row, highlight the first row select Table Tools >Table Design > Header Row box in the table style options check the box
3. If your table spans a page select Table Tools > Layout tab > "Repeat Header Rows" in the Data section

Using space, tab, or enter to get the right look for a document makes it less accessible. While three or fewer uses is acceptable, four or more is strongly discouraged. Instead, change the overall layout.

• For selecting the right pagination option, go to the Layout tab > Page Setup > Breaks
• For arranging content horizontally, go to the Layout tab > Page Setup > Columns and select the count
• For long documents, insert contents from the References tab > Table of Contents section > Table of Contents

Once the above steps are done, read the document out loud. Written language in emails and documents may not translate well into the verbal language used by screen readers. For example, “Fri” is read as “fry” and “7-10” is read as “seven dash ten.” Screen readers follow simple language rules when reading screen text.

• For ease of readability, go to View tab > Views section > Read Mode
• Prefer using abbreviations over acronyms
• Use "or" or "and" instead of slash (/)