Karen McCall
Microsoft 365 for Windows Accessibility

This page has updated (2025) versions of older tutorials. There are also new tutorials about tools and features in Microsoft 365/Microsoft Office. As I create new tutorials, they will be added here.

Books

Primer for Accessible PowerPoint 2023 - tagged PDF.

Using the WCAG 2.x Standards for PDFs 2024 - tagged PDF.

Office/M365

Tables in Word and PDF 2025 - tagged PDF. This is a best practice guide for creating tables for specific purposes in a document. I still advocate avoiding using tables for design layout!

Accessibility Tools for Remediation 2025 - tagged PDF.

TPGi Colour Contrast Analyzer using the Keyboard - tagged PDF.

Working with Office Colour Palettes from Keyboard - tagged PDF.

Basic Keyboard Commands - tagged PDF.

Word

Customizing a Keyboard Command in Word - tagged PDF..

Accessible Document Design Basics 2022 - tagged PDF.

Add Accessible Images to Graphics 2019 - tagged PDF.

Advanced Accesibility Tools in word 2024 - tagged PDF.

Citations and Bibliographies in Word 2018 - tagged PDF.

Creating an Index 2018 - tagged PDF.

Creating Multiple Tables of Content 2024 - gagged PDF.

Cut, Copy and Paste Options 2022 - tagged PDF.

Footnotes and Endnotes 2018 - tagged PDF.

How to Show Hidden Styles 2023 - tagged PDF.

Importing and Exporting Styles in Word 2019 - tagged PDF.

Office Clipboard Options 2022 - tagged PDF.

Office Spike 2022 - tagged PDF.

Page Numbers and Section Breaks 2019 - tagged PDF.

Readability Statistics in Word 2020 - tagged PDF.

Send from Word to PowerPoint (Create PowerPoint Presentaitons in Word) 2019 - tagged PDF.

Swapping Style Sets in Word 2019 - tagged PDF.

Track Changes and Comments 2019 - tagged PDF.

Types of Styles in Word 2022 - tagged PDF.

 

PowerPoint

Accessible PowerPoint Placeholders 2018 - tagged PDF.

Alternate Format from PowerPoint 2019 - tagged PDF.

Accessible Slide Sample Templates (Samples you can use). This is a PPTX document so you might be asked if you really want to open it, or it may open in Protected view.

Basics of Accessible PowerPoint 2018 - tagged PDF.

PowerPoint Speaker Notes accessibility in PDFs 2021 - tagged PDF.

PDF

Accessible PdF Forms Handout 2019 - tagged PDF.

End User Testing PDFs 2022 - tagged PDF.

Exporting PDF to Word 2023 - tagged PDF.

The Basics of Tagged PDF 2025 - tagged PDF.

General Tips and Techniques

These are older tutorials that are still useful..

Avoid Using OneDrive as the Default Document Location.

Reading and Customizing Status Bar information

 

Unlink Field Codes in Word Documents

If you've created a Word document with a linked Table of Contents, Table of Figures, Table of Tables, links and/or a Bibliography, you may need to unlink those items before sending them to be published. There is a tool in Word for doing that. There is no keyboard command for this tool but you can add it to the Quick Access Toolbar.

Here are the steps:

  1. Press Alt + F, T for the File/Backstage area, Word Options.
  2. In the Word Options dialog, press Q for Quick Access Toolbar.
  3. Tab into the settings for the Quick Access Toolbar and in the list of commands, choose All commands.
  4. Press Tab to move to the actual list of all commands.
  5. Press U for Unlink Fields or Unlink Field Codes…forget the exact words but you’ll know it when you land on it.
  6. Press Alt + A to Add it to your Quick Access Toolbar.
  7. Tab to the OK button and press Enter.

Each item on the Quick Access Toolbar has a corresponding number, for example, on my Quick Access Toolbar, if I press Alt followed by 4 (do not press them together), I put focus in the Apply Styles Pane. While in the Quick Access Toolbar settings you can move items up or down so that they have different numbers depending on how often you use them. The order in which they appear in the list of tools on the Quick Access Toolbar corresponds to the number you will use to activate them.

When you need to unlink things like links, citations, tables of content, bibliography, tables of figures and so forth, select them and then go to the Quick Access toolbar and activate the Unlink Fields/Unlink Field Codes.

If you need to make sure that all linked items in your document are unlinked, select all of the document (Ctrl + A) and then activate the Unlink Fields/Unlink Field Codes from the Quick Access Toolbar.

This tool has been around since at least Word 95/97...who knew!?

 

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