New Components
Quick Reference
Most accessibility failures in Word documents aren’t deliberate. They come from ordinary authoring habits: bolding a line so it reads as a heading, dragging an image so the text wraps neatly around it, pressing Enter twice to open up a page. Each choice looks correct on screen, and each one removes structure that assistive technology depends on.
This maps that distinction across the elements most documents actually use. For each one, it names the tool that produces accessible output and the tool that produces the same visual result without the underlying structure — the second being, in almost every case, the faster habit to fall into.
Most-used elements in a Word document
- Headings and titles
- Body paragraphs
- Bulleted and numbered lists
- Tables
- Images and pictures
- Text boxes
- Headers and footers
- Page numbers
- Table of contents
- Hyperlinks
- Footnotes and endnotes
- SmartArt, diagrams and charts
- Cover pages
- Columns and section breaks
- Captions
- Watermarks
Accessible vs. inaccessible authoring choices
| Element | Accessible approach | Avoid (inaccessible) |
|---|---|---|
| Headings & titles | Built-in Heading styles (Heading 1-6) via the Styles pane | Manually bolding or enlarging text to look like a heading |
| Lists | Built-in Bullets / Numbering library | Typing “-“, “1.”, “2.” as plain characters |
| Images | Alt Text pane + “In Line with Text” wrapping | Floating wrap (Square, Tight, Behind/In Front of Text); text embedded in an image |
| Tables | Table Design > Header Row, “Repeat Header Rows”; tabular data only | Merged cells; tables used to control page layout |
| Text boxes / callouts | A bordered paragraph style or a table cell | Insert > Text Box (content falls outside reading order) |
| Diagrams | SmartArt with one consolidated alt-text description | SmartArt or grouped shapes left without alt text |
| Table of contents | Insert > Table of Contents, auto-built from Heading styles | A manually typed list of section titles and page numbers |
| Hyperlinks | Descriptive link text (e.g. “2025 accessibility report”) | “Click here” or a bare, unformatted URL |
| Spacing | Paragraph spacing settings (Layout > Spacing Before/After) | Repeated Enter presses or empty paragraphs |
| Alignment | Left alignment | Full justification (creates uneven spacing / “rivers”) |
| Page & section breaks | Layout > Breaks (Page Break, Section Break) | Repeated Enter presses to push content to the next page |
| Language & metadata | Review > Language; document title set in File > Info > Properties | Left at default / blank |
| Cover pages | A styled Heading 1 plus normal paragraphs | Word’s built-in Cover Page gallery (built from stacked text boxes) |
| Text emphasis | Bold / Italic character formatting | WordArt or text effects (shadow, outline, 3-D) |