UPDATED 22:38 EDT / DECEMBER 21 2016

APPS

Microsoft makes Office 365 more accessible to the visually impaired

Microsoft Corp. has made a number of improvements to Office 365, including making documents easier to read for those with poor eyesight.

Announcing the updates, Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Office group, said the idea was to make content produced using the company’s productivity suite easier to access for the visually impaired. As such, the company has made its Accessibility Checker function easier to find.

“The Accessibility Checker is now easily discoverable in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and Visio, helping you ensure your content can be consumed without barriers by people with varying levels of vision, hearing, cognition and mobility,” Koenigsbauer wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “The Accessibility Checker analyzes your material and provides recommendations alongside your document, helping you understand how to fix errors and create more accessible content over time.”

To find the Check Accessibility option in Word and other Office apps, simply click on the Review tab. The feature has been made available in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and Visio on Windows, Office for Mac and Office Online.

Another new feature is an intelligent descriptive text for images based on Office 365’s Designer function that helps users to create professional-grade presentations, Koenigsbauer said. The feature can automatically suggest text descriptions for images in PowerPoint and Word documents. It’s powered by Microsoft’s Computer Vision Cognitive Service, which is machine learning-based image recognition and analysis technology to identify and label content. In time, Microsoft plans to make the feature available in other Microsoft applications.

A third new feature, specifically for Outlook, is the ability to request accessible content via Outlook MailTips. Enabling this means the software will prompt users to run the Accessibility Checker before sending off emails to specific addresses, so they can fix any issue that may make it difficult for the recipient to understand the message as intended.

Finally, Microsoft has added a new feature for those using screen readers that lets them determine the content of shared files and links before they click on them. So instead of just reading out a long and often meaningless URL or file name, the screen reader will read out the name of the file or the title of the webpage.


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