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Re: Accessible Excel files

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From: Steve Green
Date: Feb 13, 2024 10:46AM

Although you can apply some of the WCAG success criteria to Excel files, many are not applicable and others need to be interpreted in the context of an entirely different technology. It's got very little in common with website accessibility testing.



There are two main issues with keyboard navigation:



1. The grid of cells does not have a defined reading order. This is different from linear file formats like websites, PDFs, Word documents etc.. For Excel files, the solution is to put everything into column A except for two-dimensional content like tables. If you put things in other columns, blind screen reader users won't find them.

2. Floating elements such as images, charts, Text Boxes, form controls etc. do have a linear focus order, but it has no relationship with the grid of cells. In most cases we recommend either not using floating elements at all, or marking them as decorative and providing their content in the grid of cells.



There is much, much more to it than that. We have a 4-hour training course on creating accessible Excel files – I'm not trying to sell it, but it gives you an idea of how much there is to learn. Much of that information is on the web, but it's fragmented and some of it is wrong.



If you follow all the guidelines, Excel files can be reasonably accessible, but my experience has been that they almost never are if the accessibility wasn't intentionally designed in. The layout often needs to be changed substantially, and Excel's constraints mean it's sometimes just not possible to make a file accessible.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd