Maybe you’ve seen the little blue men
appearing in the margins of your Word documents? They are Accessibility Recommendations and, yes, there is a way to get rid of them.
There are two ways to hide these little creatures, both take a little digging.
Right-click on any Accessibility icon then the … menu button on the bottom to reveal “Turn off accessibility recommendations”.
Or go to from Review | Check Accessibility | Options : Accessibility or File | Options | Accessibility.
Uncheck the box ‘Show me options for creating accessible documents’ which is Microsoft corporate speak for ‘Show Accessibility icons in margin’.
Accessibility of documents is important. Sometimes it’s a requirement of your organization or even the law.
However, it’s not always appropriate or wanted for every document. It’s annoying that Microsoft makes accessibility features a software-wide setting that applies to all documents, instead of being easily turned on/off for each document.
(It’s a growing problem with Office, settings that should be easily selectable for each file can only be globally changed. Grammar and style, Accessibility and Copilot are the main offenders).
Fixing common Office document accessibility problems
Check Accessibility problems as you work in Word, Excel and PowerPoint
