Ask a public agency what it has remediated for accessibility and you will hear about the website and the PDFs. Almost nobody mentions the spreadsheets — and yet the budget workbook, the salary schedule, the quarterly performance data, and the open-records export are all sitting on the same public site, in the same compliance scope, usually untouched. A spreadsheet published for the public is electronic content, and the law does not care that it happens to be an .xlsx.
Yes, spreadsheets are in scope
Two separate rules land on the same file. For federal agencies and their vendors, the Revised Section 508 Standards require electronic content — which explicitly includes the documents an agency publishes or distributes — to conform to WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA. For state and local government, the Department of Justice's ADA Title II web rule requires web content and mobile apps to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, with compliance dates of April 26, 2027 for public entities serving 50,000 or more people and April 26, 2028 for smaller entities and special district governments. A spreadsheet you post for download is web content under that rule.
The practical consequence: the success criteria that spreadsheets fail most often are 1.1.1 (Non-text Content), 1.3.1 (Info and Relationships), 1.4.1 (Use of Color), and 1.4.3 (Contrast). Every fix below maps to one of them.
1. Name the tabs, delete the debris
A screen-reader user navigates a workbook sheet by sheet, and the tab name is the only signal they get about what is on it. “Sheet1,” “Sheet2,” and “Copy of Sheet2” tell them nothing. Give each sheet a short, unique, meaningful name — “FY27 Operating Budget,” “Notes and Sources” — and delete blank or abandoned worksheets outright. An empty sheet a sighted user skips past in half a second is a dead end someone else has to arrow through.
2. Use a real Excel Table with a header row
This is the single highest-value fix in the whole file. Select your data, choose Insert → Table, and confirm “My table has headers.” That turns a loose block of cells into a structure assistive technology understands, so a screen reader announces the column name with each value — “Department: Public Works, Amount: $412,000” — instead of reading a naked number and leaving the user to count columns backwards to work out what it meant. Give the table a descriptive name in Table Design while you are there.
Some agency authoring guides additionally have you define named ranges such as Title_Region, Row_Title, and Column_Title. That convention helps older versions of JAWS announce context and still appears in several federal guides, but treat it as a supplement to a properly structured table, not a substitute for one.
3. Kill the merged cells and the blank rows
Merged cells are the most common structural defect we find in government workbooks, and they are almost always cosmetic — a title stretched across the top, a category label spanning four rows. Merging destroys the row-and-column relationship a screen reader uses to place a value, and it breaks sorting and filtering for everyone else too. Use Center Across Selection if you want the visual effect, or just put the label in one cell.
Blank rows and columns are the second most common. A screen reader treats an empty row as the end of the data region, so a workbook “spaced out for readability” reads as three unrelated fragments. If you need visual separation, use row height, borders, or cell styles — not emptiness.
4. Alt text on every chart, image, and shape
Right-click any chart, picture, SmartArt object, or shape and choose View Alt Text. For a chart, describe what the chart shows — the trend, the comparison, the outlier — not the words “bar chart.” And keep the source data visible on a sheet: a chart is a rendering of numbers, and alt text can summarize a rendering but cannot replace access to the numbers themselves. If the data lives only inside the chart object, put it in a table.
5. Color is not information
Conditional formatting is where good intentions go wrong. If red fill means “over budget” and green means “on track,” a screen reader announces neither, and a colorblind reader sees two similar grays. Add a status column carrying the actual word, or a symbol, alongside the color. Separately, check contrast: text needs at least 4.5:1 against its fill, and the pale yellows and light grays that look tasteful in a workbook frequently fail. Put a legend on the sheet explaining any coding you use.
Have a library of published workbooks nobody has ever tested? We remediate spreadsheets, Word files, and PDFs at volume for agencies, districts, and health systems — and train your staff to author them accessibly so the backlog stops growing.
6. Headers, footers, and floating text boxes are invisible
Content placed in a worksheet's header or footer, in a watermark, or in a floating text box is unreliable for assistive technology — it may be skipped entirely. That matters because it is exactly where agencies put the things that count: the effective date, the data source, the “preliminary — do not cite” caveat. Repeat any vital information in a real cell on the sheet. A short “About this workbook” sheet holding the title, date, source, contact, and a note on how the sheets are organized is a cheap fix that solves this permanently.
7. Set the properties and the landing cell
In File → Info, give the workbook a real Title in the document properties — the filename is not a title — and confirm the editing language is set correctly so a screen reader pronounces the content properly. Then, before you save, press Ctrl+Home on each sheet so the file opens at cell A1 rather than wherever you happened to be editing. Use descriptive hyperlink text instead of pasted URLs, and freeze the header row so it stays in view while scrolling.
8. Run the checker — then actually test it
Review → Check Accessibility catches the mechanical failures: missing alt text, merged cells, default or blank sheet names, low contrast. Clear every error before publishing. But understand what it cannot do — it cannot tell you whether your alt text is meaningful, whether your table headers describe the right columns, or whether the workbook makes any sense read linearly. That takes opening the file in a screen reader and navigating it the way a user would. Automated checks are a floor, not a finish line.
What this means when you are buying remediation
Ask vendors two questions. Does the scope include spreadsheets and other non-PDF documents, or only PDFs? And does the deliverable come with documented manual testing, or just a clean automated-checker screenshot? Both answers separate real remediation from a file that has merely stopped throwing warnings. And if your team produces new workbooks every month, authoring training pays for itself faster than remediation does — building structure while you are already in the file takes minutes, while retrofitting a finished workbook takes hours.