The Microsoft mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and we on the Sway team take this mission to heart.
We built the Sway app to make it easy to bring in content from multiple sources, so you can convey a richer story with photos, videos and other multimedia. Our built-in design engine instantly puts your creations into cohesive layouts and designs, so you don’t have to spend hours on formatting. And our digital format makes it easy to share your Sway with a link and ensures that it adapts to different screens.
On top of these, we’ve been working on several features to help users with vision, mobility and cognitive impairments use Sway in their personal and work lives. All of the following enhancements are now available on the Sway web and Windows apps.
Accessibility Checker
We’re excited to launch the Accessibility Checker to help authors:
- Identify images or videos with missing alternative text.
- Review and update all alternative text.
- Review and update all non-descriptive hyperlinks.
The Accessibility Checker opens up to the left of the Storyline area, so you won’t have to switch back and forth while composing your Sway and checking its accessibility.
Sway will automatically use existing alt text when you import images from Word, PowerPoint, PDF and online sources. It will also use file names as alt text when you upload photos from your local drive.
Keyboard enhancements
Everything that you can do with a mouse or with touch, you can now do with a keyboard.
Here’s how it works:
- Use Ctrl+F6 to move among different areas in Sway, such as the menu bar, the left side pane, the Storyline area and the Preview mode.
- Click the tab or the arrow keys to move across a given area.
- Press Enter when you find the function you need.
The boxed outline in the example below helps you find your keyboard’s current focus:
You can refer to this handy list of keyboard shortcuts for Sway.
High Contrast mode
We also made a number of enhancements for users who work in High Contrast mode, including:
- Icons are converted into glyphs to make symbols and text clearer.
- Borders are bolded to help identify different sections in Sway.
- Dotted outlines pinpoint your keyboard’s current focus.
Here is how Sway looks in the improved High Contrast mode:
Accessibility View
We’ve reached out to several people to ensure that we keep improving the Sway Accessibility View for our users. Today, it enables a variety of helpful functions, including:
- It enables assistive technology to access all of your Sway’s content and provide you with jump locations.
- It changes your Sway’s color scheme to black and white to provide you with higher contrast.
- It switches Sway to vertical scrolling to make it easier for you to navigate your Sway with assistive technology or with a keyboard.
We’d love to learn more about how we could further improve this view on our Sway UserVoice page.
Storyline expansion
Additionally, we’ve heard from users that you want to be able to see more of your content when creating a Sway. As such, we’ve enabled the ability to expand the Storyline area (and hide the Preview mode), so you can have a more focused and maximized authoring canvas:
Find
To help authors quickly move around and find things in Sway, we’ve added the ability to search for content in the Storyline area. Simply navigate to the search icon at the top of your Storyline, input your keywords and press Enter.
Viewers can also access this feature by switching to Accessibility View and clicking Find.
Assistive technology (including screen readers)
Finally, Sway is now aligned with the accessibility standards of WAI-ARIA, so you should have an overall improved experience when using your favorite assistive technology with the app.
We would love to hear more of your suggestions on how we can improve Sway’s accessibility. Please send us your thoughts on our UserVoice page.
For more resources on Sway accessibility, please refer to the following guides: Sway accessibility, Sway Windows app for Office 365 VPAT and Sway web app for Office 365 VPAT.
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