The top Microsoft 365 accessibility features everyone should know

1. Live captions in Teams

If you’re deaf, hard of hearing or perhaps the spoken language in the meeting isn’t your first – Teams live captions is a fantastic feature that can make it easier to follow meetings and understand not only what is being said, but also, who is saying it.

It’s worth noting that when you enable live captions in a Team meeting, only you will be able to see them rather than all participants. Therefore it may be worth sharing this feature with your colleagues at the beginning of a meeting in case they would like to enable it themselves. Play our video above to find out how you can enable live captions in Teams

2. Dictation Tool

The dictation tool in M365 allows you to speak into your microphone rather than type on your keyboard and can be used on a variety of apps including Outlook, PowerPoint, Word and Excel. Microsoft are constantly improving this feature to make it as accurate as possible and is available in a range of languages. Watch our video above to learn how you can access the dictation tool in Outlook.

3. Immersive reader

Microsoft’s Immersive Reader tool implements proven techniques to improve reading and writing for people, regardless of age or ability. It can help build confidence for emerging readers learning to read at higher levels and offer text decoding solutions for students with learning differences such as dyslexia. Let’s have a look at what it can offer your workforce:

• Change font size, text spacing, and background colour.
• Split up words into syllables.
• Highlight verbs, nouns, adjectives and sub-clauses.
• Choose between two fonts optimised to help with reading.
• Read out text aloud and change the speed of reading.
• Translate text into different languages.

Watch our video above to find out how to use it. You’ll be able to find the immersive reader tool in OneNote, Word, PowerPoint and the web version of Outlook.

You can also access immersive reader through the Microsoft Lens iOS app, which allows you to take an image of a physical piece of text and then enter into the immersive reader environment on your phone. Watch our video below to see how it’s done.

4. Accessibility checker in M365

The Accessibility Checker ensures your Microsoft Office content is easy for people of all abilities to read and edit. Therefore, you can make sure the content you create and share with your workforce is accessible to everyone and means that you may me able to reach an individual that you may have otherwise missed without using this feature. Use the built-in Accessibility Checker to spot and fix issues quickly – find out more.

Microsoft Accessibility Fundamentals course

Technology can empower people to achieve more, help strengthen education opportunities and make the workplace more inviting and inclusive for people with disabilities. And with more than 1 billion people with disabilities in the world, Microsoft believes accessibility and inclusion are essential to delivering on their mission to empower every person and every organisation to achieve more. Discover Microsoft’s accessibility fundamentals course to find out the many ways you can ensure your organisation is accessible and inclusive.