Chapter 11: Writing for Everyone – Understanding Document Accessibility

If you're going to the lengths of writing something down in Microsoft Word, the chances are your goal is to communicate your ideas with others. Part of communicating effectively is tailoring your message to a target audience.

Unfortunately, in business, we can't always predict everything about the person on the other end of a document. At a minimum, we want them to be able to read what we have written. But what happens when we send a document to a client who is blind or low-vision, who relies on a screen reader to navigate and interpret the document, and we haven't designed our document in a way that makes it easy for a screen reader to do that?

I'll tell you what happens: we fail in our mission to communicate effectively.

In this chapter, we will cover some basics for making your Microsoft Word documents accessible for everyone using some simple, free tools available within...