What’s New: Doubling Down on Accessibility
Microsoft is a recognized leader in championing accessibility in technology, the workforce, and workplaces. Brad Smith, President and Vice-Chair of Microsoft outlined the next phase of the company’s commitment to creating a more accessible world in a blog post titled Doubling Down on Accessibility posted in April 2021. Smith indicated that “this stronger foundation will allow us to implement an ‘accessibility by design’ philosophy not only for Microsoft products, but for our tools and services that support software developers and suppliers everywhere.”
In this blog, some of the “accessible by design features” and advances in Microsoft 365 are highlighted including:
“A new Background accessibility checker will provide a prompt to fix accessibility issues in content across the core Office apps and Outlook will nudge users to correct accessibility issues.
AI in Microsoft Word will detect and convert to heading styles crucial for blind and low-vision readers.
A new Excel navigation pane designed for screen readers will help people easily discover and navigate objects in a spreadsheet.
Expanding Immersive Reader, used by 35 million people every month, to help with the comprehension of PowerPoint slides and notes.
High-contrast mode in Teams can be used to access shared content using PowerPointLive which will reduce eye strain and accommodate light sensitivity with Dark Mode in Word
New LinkedIn features that include auto-captioning for LinkedIn Live broadcasts for enterprise content and dark mode later this year.”
This blog features lots of exciting initiatives to create a more accessible and inclusive world.
To read the entire blog, click here.