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Help Yourself First: Every Accessibility Tool, Guide and Benchmark We Have

By Simon Dakin 6 min read

We are, at heart, an organisation that wants you to help yourself. Not because we are too busy to talk, but because the best accessibility outcomes come from teams who understand the work and can do most of it themselves. So we publish a lot, for free: interactive tools, application-specific guides, plain-English references, guidelines and Australian benchmarks. The more of it you can use without us, the better.

This post pulls the whole library together in one place. Bookmark it, share it with your team, and dip into whatever you need. And right at the end, the honest part: when self-help is not enough to reach the standard you need, we hope you will get in touch. That is exactly what we are here for.

New: four application-specific document guides

Most inaccessible documents are not made by careless people. They are made by capable people using everyday software with a print mindset, formatting for how a page looks rather than declaring what its content actually is. To tackle that head on, we have just published four new guides, each focused on the tool you actually work in:

  • Microsoft Word accessibility guide - real heading styles instead of bold text, alt text, accessible tables, language and metadata, and how to export a tagged PDF that keeps it all.
  • PowerPoint accessibility guide - unique slide titles, setting reading order in the Selection Pane, alt text for charts, contrast, captions, and why a poster-style slide falls apart for assistive technology.
  • InDesign accessibility guide - mapping paragraph styles to export tags, the Articles panel for reading order, alt text via Object Export Options, and why InDesign output is almost always finished in Acrobat.
  • Acrobat PDF accessibility guide - the tag tree, reading order, table headers, alt text, language and metadata, scanned-PDF OCR, and validating to WCAG 2.2 and PDF/UA.

They sit alongside our overarching document accessibility guide and the hands-on Common Document Accessibility Issues tool. If documents are your pain point, start there.

The common thread: a print mindset does not work online

Every one of those guides keeps returning to the same idea. For decades, a document had one destination: a printer. When the only output is paper and the only reader is sighted, all that matters is how the page looks. You can fake a heading with bold text, create space with empty paragraphs, and use a table to line things up. It prints perfectly.

Online, a screen reader does not see your page. It reads the structure underneath: the headings, lists, tables, alt text and reading order that tell it what each thing is. Bold text is just bold text. A layout table becomes a maze. An untagged PDF is, in effect, a picture of a document. The fix is the same in every tool: stop formatting how things look and start declaring what they are. We made the broader version of this case in accessibility isn't a button or an add-on.

The full self-service library

Here is everything, organised so you can find the right starting point fast.

Interactive tools

Application and document guides

Practitioner guides

References and guidelines

Benchmarks and research

Questions and wayfinding

When self-help isn't enough, contact us

The honest limit of any library is this: tools and guides help you do the work, but they do not do the work for you, and some of the work needs experience our pages cannot hand over. We are glad when a team reads a guide, fixes their documents and never needs to call us. We are equally glad when they reach the edge of what they can do alone and pick up the phone.

That edge usually looks like one of these:

You do not need a project in mind to reach out. Advice and discussion is genuinely free and genuinely no-obligation, and a 20-minute discovery call is the easiest way to work out whether you can finish the job yourself or whether a hand would help.

Help yourself first. We built all of this so you can. And when you hit the standard you cannot reach alone, that is our cue, not your failure.

Book a Discovery Call Explore All Tools and Guides

Tools Documents Strategy Remediation

Common questions about our tools, guides and services

Does ExceedAbility offer free accessibility tools and guides?

Yes. We publish a large free library: interactive tools such as the WCAG Criteria Search, Accessibility Statement Generator and Maturity Self-Assessment, application-specific guides for Word, PowerPoint, InDesign and Acrobat, plain-English references and guidelines, and Australian benchmarks and research. They are designed to help teams help themselves.

Which guide should I use to make a document accessible?

Start with the tool you author in. We have dedicated guides for Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe InDesign and Adobe Acrobat (PDF), plus an overarching document accessibility guide. Each covers the common pitfalls, why a print mindset breaks online, and the step-by-step path to a WCAG 2.2 compliant file.

When should I contact a consultant instead of doing it myself?

Use our tools and guides for everyday authoring and quick checks. Contact us when the stakes or complexity rise: an independent audit for compliance or procurement, a large remediation backlog, conflicting access needs across disability cohorts, assistive-technology user testing, or embedding accessibility into how your organisation works through organisational uplift.

Reached the edge of what you can do alone?

Use the library for as long as it serves you. When you hit a standard you cannot reach by yourself, a short, no-obligation discovery call is the fastest way to work out the next step.

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