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Microsoft Word: Decorative Image Accessibility

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From: Jim Homme
Date: Jun 26, 2019 11:33AM

Hi,
This is with Word 2016.


* The accessibility checker wants me to mark decorative images with a check box.
* When I do that, JAWS says the word "Decorative" for these images.
* NVDA does not say anything for these same images, unless I use the Advanced settings and use the experimental UIA settings.
* On the web, blank alt text makes decorative images disappear for both screen readers.
* I was lead to believe that if I put a single space as the alt text in Word, that a screen reader would ignore any image with a single space as alt text.
* As a screen reader user, I am used to not hearing anything for decorative images, because this is how I was trained it should work.

My question is: How should this work, since I do not necessarily know which screen reader a person might have when they read my Word document?

Thanks.

Jim



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Jim Homme
Digital Accessibility
Bender Consulting Services
412-787-8567
https://www.benderconsult.com/our%20services/hightest-accessible-technology-solutions