Imagine if Clippy didn’t suck and instead made genuinely helpful suggestions to ensure the content you create is accessible to as wide an audience as possible. That’s the idea behind a new tool Microsoft announced today at its annual Microsoft Ability Summit. The new “Accessibility Assistant” for Microsoft 365 office software is like a spelling or grammar checking tool that will instruct users on how to prevent and correct accessibility issues in real time when creating content.
A new person-shaped icon will be used to flag the location of accessibility issues across your work, such as low contrast between text and background — the most frequent accessibility issue that occurs in Word documents, according to Microsoft. The Accessibility...