How to Set Accessibility, Protection, and Governance Standards for Word Documents

With three sites and a team of coordinators, the Tutoring Club no longer has one person who checks every document. If accessibility and privacy depend on someone remembering to fix things at the end, they will be missed. The answer is to put the right choices into the template kit from Tutorial 1 of this level, and to write down a few short rules everyone follows.

In this tutorial you will make the template accessible by default, write an alt-text standard, draft a one-page governance policy, decide how documents are labeled and protected, and set up a manual review that covers the gaps in Word's checker. You fixed single documents in Intermediate Tutorial 8; now you set the standard for the whole team.

Build accessibility into the template

Every accessibility fix you make in a finished document is a fix someone forgot to make in the template. Open the kit's .dotx file itself (right-click it and choose Open, not double-click, which starts a new document) and set these once:

Checking contrast. The common target, from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), is a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for body text and 3 to 1 for large text (about 18 pt, or 14 pt bold). Word doesn't show the ratio, so use any free contrast checker with the color codes from Customize Colors. Dark blue on white passes comfortably; light gray, yellow and pale green on white usually fail. Keep the Text/Background - Dark 1 color black or very dark gray.

Write an alt-text standard

Telling volunteers to "add alt text" produces alt text like image1.png or photo. A standard gives them a rule and examples to copy. Keep it to half a page and add it to the kit's one-page guide.

• Say what it shows and why it is there, usually in one or two sentences.
• Don't start with "Picture of" or "Image of". The screen reader already says it is a picture.
• For charts, give the message and the key numbers, and put the full data in a table or in the text nearby.
• Don't name students or other minors in alt text, captions or file names.
• Mark purely decorative pictures as decorative, so screen readers skip them.
• Check any alt text Word generates. Read it and rewrite it; it often describes the wrong thing.

Add the alt text with Picture Format› then Accessibility› then Alt Text or by right-clicking the picture and choosing View Alt Text. The same box has the Mark as decorative check box.

Draft a short governance policy

Governance means agreed rules for how documents are created, stored, shared and deleted. For a small club, one page is enough. A longer policy won't be read, and a rule nobody reads protects nobody. Cover these six topics:

Control metadata and personal information

Metadata is information about the document that is stored inside the file: its title, tags, authors, company and more. It travels with every copy you send, and search tools use it to find files.

• Title and Tags. Go to File› then Info and fill in Title and Tags under Properties on the right. Agree a short tag list in the policy, such as policy, manual, fort-lee, englewood.
• Author. Under Related People, Word fills in the Author from the user name in File› then Options› then General or from the account you are signed in with. A template made on someone's home computer can carry their name into every document made from it. Right-click the name to remove it, and add a role such as Tutoring Club instead.
• Everything else. Click Show All Properties at the bottom of the list, or Properties› then Advanced Properties at the top, to see fields such as Subject, Company and Comments.

Before any file leaves the club, run File› then Info› then Check for Issues› then Inspect Document on a copy, as you learned in Intermediate Tutorial 8. Removing Document Properties and Personal Information clears the author names and the other properties, so add the Title back afterwards if the PDF needs it.

After you remove personal information with the Inspector, Word usually turns on Remove personal information from file properties on save for that file, so names are not added back the next time someone saves it. In many versions you can see this check box in File› then Options› then Trust Center› then Trust Center Settings› then Privacy Options. It applies to that one document, not to Word as a whole, and the exact wording and place vary between versions.

Choose the right protection level

Word has several kinds of "protection", and they protect against very different things. Most only prevent accidents. Write in the policy which level each kind of document needs.

Sensitivity labels are part of Microsoft 365 for organizations, and only your administrators can create them. If your organization uses them, you'll see a Sensitivity button on the Home tab (and in some versions next to the file name), with label names your organization chose. Don't invent labels in the policy; copy the names you actually see. If you don't see the button, your organization doesn't use labels for you, and the other levels in the table are what you have.

Run a manual review the checker can't

The Accessibility Checker finds missing alt text and missing header rows. It can't judge whether the alt text is useful, whether the headings make sense, or whether a reader can follow the order. A short manual review, the same every time, covers that gap. Add it to the review stage of your workflow from Tutorial 3 of this level.

Common mistakes

Practice