Screen Reader Accessibility for Microsoft Forms

[Mike Insch]

There has been a suggestion on the Forms UserVoice for 12 months now requesting that Screen Reader Accessibility be implemented for Microsoft Forms - this suggestion has so far gone unanswered.

As the original requester points out, and is still the case today, Forms is completely unusable for users of Screen Reader software such as JAWS, SuperNova, NVDA, TextHelp etc.  In the EU, under recent accessibility legislation, it's mandatory for public sector bodies to ensure that all internal and external systems meet minimum accessibility requirements - currently Forms does not meet these requirements.

Can someone from Microsoft please comment on this, and if possible provide a realistic timescale estimate for when it is expected that Forms will meet basic accessibility requirements?  If possible, please also comment regarding whether it is planned to support WCAG 2.0 or the recently published WCAG 2.1 when these requirements are implemented.

[#2]

Thanks for reaching out, Forms has fully supported "Narrator" and we are working on to adapt more ScreenReader.

[#3]

Hi Mike,

I'm an accessibility consultant for Penn State University and I'm very interested in this topic. I've been looking for an accessible form/survey tool to recommend to people, and since we recently got O365 I've been doing some testing with forms. Nothing too extensive but I did set up a sample form with each question type and I was able to navigate through the entire thing with JAWS. This was in FireFox using JAWS 2018. Do you have any more details about any specific issues users have been having or is it possible there was a recent update that fixed some of those issues?

Thanks so much,

Matt