title: How to make floating images accessible to screen readers in Microsoft Word?
body: <p>My organisation now has a policy to make all documents accessible, and a long list of guidance how to do so. Most of the requirements are OK. Alt-text is only a small amount of work; sans-serif fonts may not be as nice as Times Roman, but they’re readable; spacing using paragraph formatting rather than carriage returns is good practice anyway.</p>
  <p>But then there’s figures. On a paginated document, large figures look great floating with text wrapped around them, but terrible inline, because page breaks often cause huge blank gaps in the page before the inline image. Same goes for tables. But our accessibility guidance insists that only inline images/tables are acceptable for screen readers – and Word’s accessibility checker does as well, though the requirement is missing in <a href="https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/make-your-word-documents-accessible-to-people-with-disabilities-d9bf3683-87ac-47ea-b91a-78dcacb3c66d" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Microsoft’s accessibility documentation</a>.</p>
  <p>Is there some way to make floating images (and floating tables) accessible, so that popular screen readers will know where to parse them in the context of the document? I'm expecting that the documents will be shared as an exported PDF, but even for screen readers to work with the DOCX file would be sufficient.</p>