Microsoft has rolled out a useful update to the Office Suite apps like Word, Excel and PowerPoint which creates automatic, “on‑device” Alt Text generation for images. This is a great way of helping content become more inclusive by providing automatic (but editable) descriptions of images, graphics, graphs etc. This helps screen readers and also AI tools better understand documents.
Alt Text Auto Generation is for Copilot + PCs only
This great feature leverages the on-chip NPU of Copilot+ PCs and is currently not available on older (non-AI) PCs. Sometimes the most valuable improvements are the ones that make good practice the default — especially for accessibility and inclusion.
This is a great way of ensuring content becomes meaningfully accessible by default.
You don’t need to do anything to enable this feature. You will need to be running the latest version of the Office apps on your device.
- Word, Excel and PowerPoint now generate Alt Text instantly as you insert images.
- The processing for this happens on‑device, so nothing is sent to the cloud.
- It’s currently only for Copilot+ PCs, taking advantage of the NPU
- Authors can still edit or override the generated text, keeping humans in control.