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Section 508

Reinforcing our Commitment to Accessibility

Dean HalsteadDean Halstead, Director of Accessibility, Microsoft Federal

Reinforcing our commitment to accessibility
New Accessibility Conformance Report site supports customers

Microsoft thrives on diversity because we believe in the power of engaging many perspectives. With diversity and inclusion among our corporate values, we strive to design products and services that work for everyone, including the over one billion people with disabilities. That’s why we are excited to launch an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) site to better support customers working toward their standards conformance, diversity and inclusion goals.

Microsoft provides ACRs describing how our products and services support recognized accessibility standards, including Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and European ETSI EN 301 549. Microsoft recognizes these standards are a good starting point for accessibility professionals to evaluate technology and enable employees in their organizations to achieve more for people with disabilities. Additional information about accessibility standards and ACRs is available at the new site.

Making it easier to find and analyze ACRs

Last year we made it possible to find ACRs for popular suites such as Office 365 or Microsoft 365, and we wanted to extend this capability to related products. The following improvements will make it easier to find and analyze ACRs:

  • Alias and name change ACR searching: Our updated Accessibility Conformance Report site now enables “alias” searching for products that are covered but have a new name or technology features. Users also can find “product suites” if they want to fully move to Azure and need to evaluate the entire platform consisting of over 300 ACRs.
  • Custom reports: To support customers who want to organize our ACRs in a format and order they prefer or need, users can now download, customize and use the XML and JSON formats.

More new features

We’re also introducing a number of new ACR features to streamline common tasks, including:

  • Quick reviews: To facilitate review of Microsoft ACRs—especially helpful for anyone newer to the field—we have created a summary report to create a simple overview. These summaries can make it easier to digest and gain a broad vision of the product before diving into particular sections or criteria.
  • Language translations: Section 508 summary reports are in English while EN 301 549 summary reports continue to be available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
  • Smart mapping: Given Microsoft’s goal of building better platforms and integrated solutions, some user interfaces and accessibility features are enabled by another underlying product. We have created an alias that users can select for “applies to” products without knowing anything about the technology. For example, if a customer wants to evaluate Microsoft Defender for the Internet of Things as a new way to increase security, they can simply search for that term and find the Azure Security Center includes all Azure Defender product user interfaces.
  • Bulk downloads: With so many ACRs for the variety of Microsoft platforms, another issue has been downloading all relevant documents. To address this scenario, users can select products via suite or custom-select products and download them all as a package.

Our commitment

In addition to reinforcing our commitment to accessibility, we hope the ACR improvements benefit those responsible for evaluating accessibility on behalf of their organizations. We will continue to enhance access and capabilities of our ACR site and look forward to working together to create a more accessible world.

As always, we welcome organizations to provide feedback on the ACR site or direct inquiries about the accessibility of our enterprise products or services via email to Microsoft Enterprise Disability Answer Desk.