Office 365
Office 365 is a subscription service that gives you access to the most up-to-date versions of Office experiences on PCs, Macs, browsers, tablets, and phones. It comes with the applications you know and trust, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Skype, Outlook, and OneNote, plus cloud services such as OneDrive, giving you the ability to access, edit, and share your content from anywhere.
Office 365 applications on every platform are updated regularly to improve accessibility, in line with the plans outlined in this roadmap. The goals are to ensure that:
- People with disabilities can communicate, consume and create content on any device.
- Everyone can easily create content that is accessible for all people.
Here’s what you will find on this page:
- Office users: Be productive across devices with assistive technologies
- Content creators: Make your shared content accessible
- Organizations: Achieve compliance with accessibility laws and standards
Be productive across devices with assistive technologies
Office 365 applications are being designed to make commands and information easy to access for people with vision, dexterity, and other disabilities – across a variety of devices and with both built-in and third-party assistive technologies. We enhance the usability of these applications on an ongoing basis, based on feedback from people of all abilities.
To get an overview of recent accessibility enhancements, tune into the Microsoft Mechanics video series.
To find guidance on using Office 365 with specific assistive technologies, visit Office support for accessibility.
Make your shared content accessible
As you create content, Office 365 applications offer several built-in features that make it easier to create content that is accessible to people of all abilities, enabling everyone to follow shared content without difficulty.
While creating intranet sites, you can use first-party web parts such as document libraries in SharePoint Online. These have been designed to conform to international website standards known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). After that, if you add pictures and media to your site, you can follow these steps to make the multimedia content on your site accessible.
While creating documents to be shared, if you run the Accessibility Checker within Office for PCs (coming by end of 2016 to Office for Mac and web), you can easily identify and fix accessibility gaps in your content.
While sharing videos within your organization, you can follow these steps to add subtitles or captions to videos via Office 365 video.
For guidance on creating accessible emails, presentations, PDFs, and more, visit Office support for accessibility.
Achieve compliance with accessibility laws and standards
Office 365 applications on various platforms are being designed with the requirements of Section 508, WCAG 2.0 AA, and EN 301 549 in mind. We work with external suppliers under the U.S. Department of Homeland Services Trusted Tester Program to verify conformance to accessibility standards. We have publicly-committed plans to meet the requirements of modern accessibility standards across the suite by the end of 2016.
If you are responsible for ensuring that the products you develop or purchase meet accessibility requirements, the Enterprise Disability Answer Desk can provide conformance statements that demonstrate how Office 365 applications conform to the accessibility criteria of these standards today.
