Making spreadsheets accessible – guidance coming soon

The Good Practice Team are working on creating guidance on how to make spreadsheet documents meet the legal accessibility regulations.

This will build on the ‘Making analytical publications accessible‘ guidance and will be incorporated into the ‘Releasing statistics in spreadsheets‘ guidance.

We have a lot of questions that need answering, such as:

1. What are the main issues users of assistive technology face when trying to access spreadsheets?
2. What can we do about merged cells?
3. Can we have more than one table per worksheet?
4. Can we automate the process of making spreadsheets accessible?
5. What do we do about footnotes?
6. How to we make sure everyone understands when a cell is blank and why it is blank?
7. How do we ensure users of assistive technology can navigate large datasets?

Please email Hannah.D.Thomas@ons.gov.uk if you have any experience of making spreadsheets accessible or if you have any specific questions you need answers to.

Update

We have now published a draft of our update to our ‘Releasing statistics in spreadsheets’ guidance on the Best Practice and Impact GitHub.