Below you will find the guide on creating accessible documents through Microsoft Excel. This guide will be based off of Microsoft Office 2016.
This guide will not cover alt text for pictures, heading structure, or hyperlinks because they were covered under the Word guide, but these are still common issues in Excel Files. The same steps apply for Excel. Please see the Word Guide for these procedures.
4. Select "Check Accessibility".
This will bring up the Accessibility Check on the right hand side of your document. This lists the accessibility problems Excel has found with your document.
*Note some issues are false positives. This means the checker might list an "error" "such as "reading order". Office is notifying you that some checks need to be manually done because their tool will not pick up on them. Below we will go through the common issues found in Excel spreadsheets.
Tables are the most common element used while creating an Excel document. A table has a few steps that will need to be taken to ensure its accessibility.
An example of a common table is shown below.
Excel has a tool to turn your tables into Formatted Tables. This means Excel recognizes that this is indeed a table and allows you to select options that will help define the information on the table.
To turn the table into a formatted table,
The dropdown presented will display color schemes for your table. Choosing a color scheme that alternates colors between rows in the table helps people with impaired vision to parse each data field.
3. Select your color scheme.
*Note the formatted table will create new header rows, you can choose to use this option or hide the row by.
1. Right clicking on the row number to the left and select "Hide".
Tables and charts need Alt Text the same way pictures do. To add alt text to your table.
Tables require a row for headers called, "Header Row". To ensure your table has a header row:
