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On SharePoint, the Documents Are the Problem
Modern SharePoint pages are among the better platform defaults here. The thousands of files sitting on them are not, and that is where a remediation program actually goes.
Last reviewed August 30, 2026
For IT and internal communications teams running a SharePoint intranet that staff have to use every day.
SharePoint is different from every other platform here because it is mostly internal. Internal changes the frame rather than removing it. If your organization is a US state or local government, the Department of Justice's web rule reaches your web content, an intranet included, with deadlines of April 26, 2027 for entities whose total population is 50,000 or more and April 26, 2028 for the rest. Separately from that, an employee who cannot use the tools their job requires is an accommodation question, and that route runs through employment law rather than web accessibility law. Which of those reaches you is a question for your counsel. Both are worth asking about.
Microsoft has done real work on modern SharePoint pages, and out of the box they hold up better than most of the platforms we write guides for. The problem is what people upload onto them. A PDF sitting at a URL is a web page under WCAG's own definition, so the standard reaches your document library directly rather than by analogy.
What breaks on SharePoint
The failures we find most often on this platform, and the rule each one breaks.
Untagged PDFs published by the thousand
An intranet accumulates policies, forms and handbooks, most of them exported from Word without tags. A screen reader gets an unstructured wall of text, or nothing at all, and the person needing the leave policy gives up and emails somebody.
1.3.1 Info and Relationships
Word and PowerPoint files with no heading structure
Files uploaded to a document library inherit the accessibility of whoever made them, and checking that has never been anybody's job. There is no gate between somebody's desktop and everybody's intranet.
1.3.1 Info and Relationships
Images in web parts with no alt text
The image web part makes alt text optional, and hero images and banners are added in the last ten minutes before a page goes live.
1.1.1 Non-text Content
Classic pages still in use
Classic SharePoint is a different generation of the product with a different extensibility model, and plenty of tenants still run classic pages alongside modern ones without anybody keeping a list of which is which.
4.1.2 Name, Role, Value
Custom SPFx web parts
Anything built in-house with the SharePoint Framework has exactly the accessibility its developer gave it. It is code, it behaves like code, and it is almost never reviewed like code.
4.1.2 Name, Role, Value
Color-coded status columns in lists
Red, amber and green formatting in a list view carries the whole meaning, and a screen reader gets only the underlying value. Column formatting is JSON-driven and can include text, so this one is usually fixable by whoever set it up.
1.4.1 Use of Color
The plugin question, answered
Microsoft ships its accessibility tooling inside Office rather than inside SharePoint, and that is where the useful work happens. Fix documents at the point they are made, because the alternative is fixing them one at a time forever.
There is no SharePoint plugin that will remediate a library of untagged PDFs. What has changed recently is that monitoring platforms have started scanning and remediating PDFs at scale, which is a different answer to the same question and worth knowing exists before anybody budgets for a manual program.
The Accessibility Checker in Word, Excel and PowerPoint
A checker built into Office that flags missing alt text, poor heading structure and low contrast before a file is saved or sent.
- What it does
- It is the most leveraged tool on this page, because a document fixed before upload never becomes one of the thousands that need remediating later. Training your authors to run it is the cheapest intervention in this entire guide.
- What it cannot
- It does not run on files already sitting in a library, and it judges whether alt text exists rather than whether it is right.
Accessibility Insights for Web
A free Microsoft browser extension for Chrome and Edge, with a five-minute pass and a longer guided assessment.
- What it does
- Its automated pass covers roughly 50 requirements, and its guided assessment walks a tester through roughly 20 manual checks automation cannot make. For an intranet team with no specialist, that guided path is the most valuable thing in the tool, because it teaches while it tests.
- What it cannot
- It tests pages rather than documents, and the documents are the bigger problem on most intranets. It also targets WCAG 2.1 Level AA rather than 2.2, which matters if somebody is asking you for 2.2.
PDF remediation tooling
Acrobat Pro or an equivalent, used to tag files that already exist.
- What it does
- It is the only route for a file whose source document is lost, and on an old intranet that is a large share of them.
- What it cannot
- It is slow and it is manual. Where the source document still exists, correcting it and re-exporting is faster and leaves you with something maintainable.
What to actually do
- Count the documents. The number usually decides the strategy by itself, and nobody has ever guessed it correctly.
- Stop the inflow first, by training authors to run the Office checker before they upload anything.
- Rank the existing files by how often they are opened and remediate from the top. Nobody needs a tagged copy of a 2015 memo.
- Convert your most-used PDFs into SharePoint pages, which are easier to maintain and more accessible than any PDF will ever be.
- Audit any custom SPFx web part separately, because it is code and it needs testing like code.
- Retire classic pages where you can, since the modern experience starts from a better place and you will stop maintaining two answers to every question.
On themes and templates
Stay close to the stock modern templates. Heavy branding in SharePoint usually arrives through custom CSS injection, and Microsoft is explicit that custom CSS extensibility is a classic-only option and that the modern interface ignores custom master pages and alternate CSS. The supported route on modern pages is an SPFx Application Customizer, which is code, which means it needs auditing like the custom web parts above it. Site theming through the interface is the no-code option and the one that survives Microsoft's update schedule.
One honest limit
We audit the pages and a sample of the documents. Remediating an entire document library is a separate program of work, and the honest first step is deciding which files still deserve to exist. If you are a public body, one more thing is worth checking before anybody budgets for ten thousand PDFs. The Title II rule carries exceptions, and two of them touch this directly, covering conventional electronic documents posted before your compliance date and password-protected documents tied to one person's account. Which of your files those reach is a question for the rule itself and your counsel.
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