Imagine if Clippy didn’t suck and instead made really helpful suggestions to ensure that the content you create is accessible to as wide an audience as possible. That’s the idea behind a new tool that Microsoft announced today at its Microsoft Capability Summit. The new “accessibility assistant” for Microsoft 365 office software is like a spell checking or grammar checking tool that will instruct users on how to prevent and fix accessibility issues in real time when creating content.
A new person-shaped icon will be used to mark the location of accessibility issues in your work, such as low contrast between text and background, the most common accessibility issue that occurs in Word documents, according to Microsoft. The Accessibility Assistant will begin rolling out “in the coming weeks” and will eventually replace the current Microsoft 365 Accessibility Checker, a similar tool that checks whether content is readable by people with disabilities, but only after you request it.
Microsoft also announced that customizable 3D-printed grips and accessories will be available for the Surface Pen later this year. These adaptable accessories make it easy for users with mobility issues to hold and control a stylus and are now available for the Microsoft Business Pen and Microsoft Classroom Pen 2.
Support for 13 new African languages, including Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo, has been added to Microsoft’s translation tool, allowing users to communicate across language and accessibility barriers with verbal and text-to-speech translations. And finally, LinkedIn is adding auto-generated alt text descriptions and captions using Azure Cognitive Services, Microsoft’s collection of cloud-based AI features for developers. Microsoft notes that 40 percent of LinkedIn posts contain at least one image, and while auto-generated captions and image descriptions tend to have some issues, it’s certainly better than nothing.
Microsoft’s Accessibility Assistant doesn’t have much going for it stillInitially offering features similar to the accessibility checker it is meant to replace. But seeing how comparable it is to correctional tools like Grammarly (at least visually speaking) is great, and with more updates, who knows what kind of issues it’s going to expose me to. I look forward to being humiliated by my potentially inaccessible writing habits.
