SharePoint Online (SPO) enhancements

Like other Microsoft services, SharePoint has lots of accessibility options that can easily be used to share your content with the widest possible audience. We thought it might be helpful to share some useful resources. 

Accessible images and other features

Image tagging isn’t just a feature, it’s a worthwhile piece of ‘computer etiquette’ when you’re publishing any content featuring inline images. Here are a couple of examples showing how you can quickly add alt text to your images in SharePoint and images in Microsoft Teams chats/channels

As well as images, there are lots of other options you can adopt from the accessibility features available in SharePoint to improve the experience for your users.

For University users, take a look at our dedicated help pages about accessibility in SharePoint. The University's User Experience (UX) Centre of Excellence can also provide advice. 

SharePoint features available now  

Like Teams, Microsoft has a roadmap of planned enhancements and new features in SharePoint Online. Updates and improvements are continually underway so it’s not easy to narrow down the most important, but here are some we hope you’ll find useful: 

SharePoint features rolling out soon 

Keep an eye out for these features and updates which we heard will be available in the next few months. 

  • New tools to create and align sections in modern SharePoint pages.  
  • More development and improvements for the SharePoint branding experience allowing custom fonts at the site level, and custom colour schemes, image assets, office templates and fonts available through the new central branding solution once this is launched.  
  • SharePoint pages accessibility checking – a new way of ensuring your pages meet recommended accessibility guidelines. 
  • Preview mode for SharePoint pages and news – take a look at how your finished news and pages will look once published, allowing you to make necessary changes to tweak your pages to look their best. 
  • Conditional branching in Microsoft list forms – a new feature allowing you to create a custom form that steers user input via predefined choices and routes.  

SharePoint training, help and advice  

The SharePoint Online pages on the IT Help website include lots of useful information. The University’s SharePoint Service Home site also includes an extensive help and support section as well as frequently asked questions.   

We recommend joining the Nexus365 User Group (NUG) on Teams and following the SharePoint Online User Group channel where you can find informal support and share your experiences or tips and tricks with others across the University.  

Explore these walkthroughs and tutorials for more information, and keep an eye out for Up and Running with SharePoint courses in the coming months.

Did you know?

You can keep track of projects and deadlines using SharePoint’s project management template

Find out more about streamlining your project with SharePoint lists