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Accessibility guidelines

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As you design and develop your Office Add-ins, you'll want to ensure that all potential users and customers are able to use your add-in successfully. Engineering and implementing inclusive experiences provide better usability and customer satisfaction, as well as a larger market for your solutions. We recommend you become familiar with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), international web standards that define what's needed for your add-in to be accessible.

Apply the following guidelines to ensure that your solution is accessible to all audiences.

Design for multiple input methods

  • Ensure that users can perform operations by using only the keyboard. Users should be able to move to all actionable elements on the page by using a combination of the Tab and arrow keys.
  • On a mobile device, when users operate a control by touch, the device should provide useful audio feedback.
  • Provide helpful labels for all interactive controls.
  • Explore more design and UI resources.

Make your add-in easy to use

  • Don't rely on a single attribute, such as color, size, shape, location, orientation, or sound, to convey meaning in your UI.
  • Avoid unexpected changes of context, such as moving the focus to a different UI element without user action.
  • Provide a way to verify, confirm, or reverse all binding actions.
  • Provide a way to pause or stop media, such as audio and video.
  • Don't impose a time limit for user action.

Make your add-in easy to see

  • Avoid unexpected color changes.
  • Provide meaningful and timely information to describe UI elements, titles and headings, inputs, and errors. Ensure that names of controls adequately describe the intent of the control.
  • Verify you UI elements render correctly in the Windows high-contrast themes.
  • Follow standard guidelines for color contrast.

Account for assistive technologies

  • Avoid using features that interfere with assistive technologies, including visual, audio, or other interactions.
  • Don't provide text in an image format. Screen readers can't read text within images.
  • Provide a way for users to adjust or mute all audio sources.
  • Provide a way for users to turn on captions or audio description with audio sources.
  • Provide alternatives to sound as a means to alert users, such as visual cues or vibrations.

Test your add-in

  • Always use accessibility verification and testing tools like Accessibility Insights on your add-in to catch and resolve issues before you ship.
  • Verify the screen reading experience using Windows Narrator, JAWS, or NVDA.
  • Periodically run the tools to keep up with changes to the international accessibility guidelines. For more information, see Accessibility testing.

See also