Microsoft has made a "crucial" accessibility improvement to Word for Windows

Word is a core component of Microsoft's Office suite of apps, which is why each update it receives gets a lot of attention from our readers. Recently, Microsoft removed the ability to send documents from Word to Kindle, and also updated the hyperlinking mechanism in Word. Now, it is making yet another improvement, which will be loved by customers using screen readers.

Basically, Microsoft has built a new navigation experience described as "crucial" for differently abled users leveraging screen readers. Previously, pressing the up and down keys would navigate to whatever was above or below the cursor position. This meant that you could accidentally skip over content as you move to a separate line rather than the next logical position in a document.

With the new implementation, pressing these keys should result in more logical navigation. For example, if you're at the end of a column, pressing the down key will move your cursor to the top of the next column.

At the end of a page in multi-page view, the cursor will move to the top of the next page. In tables, the down arrow now moves the cursor to the next column in the same row, instead of moving to the cell directly below in the same column:

The same behavior applies to text around images and dropped cap letters. Previously, pressing the down arrow would skip text on the other side of an image or the lines beside a dropped cap letter, but now it moves through all text on both sides of an image and through each line next to a dropped cap before continuing below it.

It is worth noting, though, that the new navigation experience is disabled by default. You can enable it using the following steps:

1. Open a Word document on your Windows device, then press ALT + F to open the File menu.
2. Press T to open Options, and then press A for Accessibility options.
3. Press the Tab key until you get to the Use reading order for arrow key navigation check box, and then press Space to select it.
4. Tab to the OK button, and then press Enter to apply the change.

This change is being rolled out to Word for Windows Version 2603 (Build 19727.20000) or later.

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Posted Saturday 7 February 2026 at 4:32 am AEST (my time).

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