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Re: MS Word accessibility supported for images?

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From: Moore,Michael
Date: Aug 20, 2009 7:05AM

Well, yes and no. We have found with JAWS 9 and 10 and Office 2007 that the alternative text will be announced by the screen reader, just not consistently. We have not been able to determine what causes the variable behavior. There are also other methods that screen reader users can use while in Word to access the alternative text in the images, but in practice I have not observed many people doing this.

If the document is converted to PDF or HTML the alternative text will definitely be present for the user. This saves a step when working from Word.

More important in Word documents, is the use of styles to mark up headings. These are made available to the JAWS screen reader users and greatly improve navigation through the document. I am not sure about other ATs. These will also convert to headings in HTML and PDF.

One thing to definitely avoid within Word documents are "text areas." These little gems that are frequently used for callouts, and misused for many other purposes, are generally missed by screen reader users. They do not appear within the normal document flow and thus are difficult to find. I have seen several hacks to get around the issue, but in practice I have not seen them work well in any version of JAWS that we have tested.

Mike Moore