# Keep content accessible over time - URL: https://m365playbooks.com/playbooks/keep-content-accessible-over-time/ - Topic: Accessibility in Microsoft 365 (Program) - Product: Microsoft 365 apps, Teams, SharePoint - Stage: Maintain - Last reviewed: October 15, 2026 - Version: 1 - Written by: Sev Derghazarian ## 1. Purpose Keep accessibility from fading once the rollout is over. New authors arrive, templates drift, Microsoft adds features, and some barriers sit in the platform itself. A light rhythm of sampling, listening to barrier reports and reviewing settings keeps content usable and shows progress where it has to be reported. ## 2. Overview A monthly sample of real content, a working barrier report channel, settings kept current, and progress reported yearly. - Effort: About 2 to 3 person-days a month - Duration: Ongoing; first cycle in 4 weeks - Complexity: Low - Who's in the room: Accessibility lead, communications lead, Microsoft 365 Apps admin, champions - Beyond E5: Nothing beyond Microsoft 365 E5 - Risk of not doing it: Without a rhythm, accessibility quietly erodes, and barriers are found by the people they exclude rather than by the organization. ## 3. Key activities ### Prerequisites 1. **Accept there's no tenant-wide report** Microsoft 365 checks accessibility one document at a time; there's no admin report of accessibility issues across the tenant. Monitoring therefore means sampling content and listening to people who meet barriers, or adding a third-party tool. Be clear with leadership about this early, so nobody expects a dashboard that doesn't exist and the sampling effort is funded instead. Who: Accessibility lead. Produces: An agreed monitoring approach. 2. **Make the feedback channel work** Agree who triages barrier reports, how fast people get a response, and how fixes are recorded. Reports are the most direct evidence you have. When a report is resolved, tell the person what changed, even if the fix is a workaround; people who see that reporting works keep reporting. Who: Accessibility lead. Produces: A triage process with a response target. 3. **Write a short checklist** Base it on your standard, but keep it to what a non-specialist can check in a few minutes: headings, alt text, reading order, link text, contrast, table headers, captions and plain language. A checklist that takes an hour per document won't be used. Who: Accessibility lead. Produces: A one-page checklist. ### Decisions 4. **Decision: How do you sample?** Pick a small, regular sample: the most-viewed intranet pages, documents sent outside the organization, and recent recordings. Check them against your short checklist, not just the checker, since the checker doesn't catch everything. Include at least one item a month reviewed by someone who uses assistive technology; their experience catches what checklists miss. Ten to twenty items a month is enough to see patterns without becoming a project. Options: No sampling; A monthly sample of high-traffic and external content. Recommended default: A monthly sample of high-traffic and external content. Who: Accessibility lead. Produces: A sampling plan. 5. **Decision: What happens to older content?** Remediating every legacy document is rarely realistic. Fix high-traffic and external content first, offer alternate formats on request, and let older content be fixed when it's next edited. Say this plainly in your accessibility statement or intranet guidance, so people know how to ask for an accessible version and how quickly they'll get it. Options: Remediate everything; High-traffic and external first; alternate formats on request. Recommended default: High-traffic and external first; alternate formats on request. Who: Accessibility lead. Produces: A legacy content approach. 6. **Decision: Add a third-party checking tool?** Microsoft 365 has no tenant-wide accessibility report, so organizations with a lot of published content sometimes add a third-party tool that scans documents or pages. Start with sampling; it shows whether the volume and the patterns justify a tool, and what it would need to check. Options: Buy a scanning tool first; Sample first; add a tool if volume and patterns justify it. Recommended default: Sample first; add a tool if volume and patterns justify it. Who: Accessibility lead. Produces: A decision, revisited at the yearly review. ### Pilot configuration 7. **Run the first sample** Sample one month's content, record what you find by type (headings, alt text, contrast, captions, link text), and trace each pattern to its cause: a template, a team, or a gap in training. Share the results with the teams whose content was sampled, framed as what to fix next rather than as a score. Who: Accessibility lead with champions. Produces: A first sample with causes. 8. **Track platform issues** Some barriers are in Microsoft 365 itself, not in your content. Record them, raise them with Microsoft, for example through its Enterprise Disability Answer Desk, and tell affected people about workarounds. Review the list at the quarterly settings review, since Microsoft updates can fix issues or introduce new ones, and remove workarounds people no longer need. Who: Accessibility lead. Produces: A list of platform issues and workarounds. ### Production configuration 9. **Review settings each quarter** New accessibility features arrive with Microsoft 365 updates. Each quarter, check the checker and alt text policies, Teams caption settings and templates against what's now available. New features can change what the checker flags or what captions support, so update the guide and templates when settings change. Who: Microsoft 365 Apps admin. Produces: Settings reviewed and updated. 10. **Refresh templates and training** Update templates when patterns in the sample point to them, and keep accessibility in onboarding so new authors start with the habits. When a template changes, tell the people who use it what changed and why, so they don't keep older copies. Who: Communications lead. Produces: Current templates and onboarding. 11. **Report progress yearly** Summarize sample results, barrier reports and what changed. Where your obligations require progress reports, this becomes their evidence. Keep it short: what improved, what didn't, and what you'll do differently next year. Who: Accessibility lead. Produces: A yearly progress summary. 12. **Make it enforceable** Policies keep the checker and alt text defaults in place, but content quality depends on authors, so the monthly sample and barrier reports are the real controls. _Partly enforced. The gaps are a risk until a mechanism covers them._ ## 4. Operating rhythm 1. **Monthly: sample content** High-traffic and external content against the checklist. Record findings by type and by team, so patterns are visible over time. Move on when: Patterns have owners and dates. 2. **Monthly: review barrier reports** (Change: Explain) Responses on time, fixes recorded. Check that every report has had a response and that fixes are recorded with their cause. Move on when: No report is left without a response. 3. **Quarterly: review settings and templates** New features, policy settings and templates. Compare policies with new features, and update the guide when anything changes. Move on when: Settings match what's available. 4. **Yearly: report progress** (Change: Inform) Sample trends, reports handled, changes made. Move on when: Leadership has seen the summary. ## 5. Common challenges - **If you** Wait for complaints. What tends to happen: Barriers are found by the people they exclude, often too late.. A better approach: Sample content monthly, even a small amount. - **If you** Count checker warnings as the measure. What tends to happen: Content passes the checker but is still hard to use.. A better approach: Sample against a short manual checklist and include people who use assistive technology. - **If you** Treat platform issues as content issues. What tends to happen: Authors are blamed for barriers they can't fix.. A better approach: Track platform issues separately and report them to Microsoft. - **If you** Fix only what's reported. What tends to happen: The same barrier appears again in the next document from the same template.. A better approach: Trace each finding to its cause and fix the template, guide or setting that produced it. - **If you** Let the owner role lapse. What tends to happen: Samples stop, reports go unanswered, and nobody notices until a complaint arrives.. A better approach: Keep the accessibility lead named in the operating rhythm and review it yearly. ## 6. Checkpoints **Pilot:** - [ ] Is there a sampling plan and a first sample? - [ ] Does the feedback channel have a response target? - [ ] Has leadership agreed that sampling, not a dashboard, is how progress is measured? **Production:** - [ ] Are samples and reports reviewed monthly? - [ ] Are settings reviewed quarterly? - [ ] Is progress summarized yearly? - [ ] Do people who reported barriers hear what changed? ## 7. Success measures Capture a baseline before you start, or you won't be able to show the change. - Sampled items meeting the checklist (Where you see it: Monthly sample; Good direction: Up) - Barrier reports answered within target (Where you see it: Feedback channel; Good direction: Up) - Open platform issues with workarounds (Where you see it: Platform issue list; Good direction: Steady) - Repeat findings traced to a template or guide fix (Where you see it: Monthly sample; Good direction: Up) **Ready-to-use text: Sampling checklist** > Headings used | Alt text present and meaningful | Reading order sensible | Link text meaningful | Contrast sufficient | Tables have headers | Captions or transcript for video | Plain language | Checker run with no errors ## 8. Additional reading **Plan:** - [Accessibility guide for Microsoft 365 Apps](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-apps/deploy/accessibility-guide) - [Accessibility fundamentals (learning path)](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/paths/accessibility-fundamental/) **Monitor:** - [Check accessibility while you work in Office apps](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/office-accessibility/check-accessibility-while-you-work-in-office-apps) - [Rules for the Accessibility Checker](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/office-accessibility/rules-for-the-accessibility-checker) ## Changelog - Version 1, 2026-10-15, Sev Derghazarian: First version. Facts checked against Microsoft Learn on 2026-10-15.