The Accessible Web Publishing Wizard for Microsoft Office is a tool that allows users to create highly accessible and standards compliant versions of Microsoft Office documents (PowerPoint, Word, Excel) for the web without having to have the technical expertise and knowledge of accessibility standards.

The tool, developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, gives users an alternative to the built-in web publishing features in Microsoft Office. The tool acts as a plug-in to Microsoft Office, and displays as an option under the file menu in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. One major difference between the Accessible Web Publishing Wizard and the built-in publisher already in the Office suite is the automated and guided wizard, which allows users to provide logical text equivalents for charts and other graphical objects. The wizard produces web pages that are logically tied together, and can be accessed using alternative browsers and assistive technology.

One of the advantages of using the tool is that it can be used with minimal training. The tool was developed so that anyone who wants to publish a Microsoft Office document can produce a web-based version that can be used for universal audiences, and does so with mainstreaming universally-designed information resources in mind.

The tool produces web pages that are compliant with Section 508 standards, W3C, and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) levels A and Double A standards for conformance. It also makes use of Cascading Style sheets for cross-platform consistency. Documents created with the Accessible Web Publishing Wizard can even be used with course management systems, such as Blackboard, WebCT, and Desire2Learn.

Not only does the tool benefit people with disabilities, it offers a clean, seamless way to publish any Word, PowerPoint, or Excel document to the web in a format that will be consistent across web browsers. This is becoming increasingly important, as many schools and institutions are using alternatives to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, such as Opera and Mozilla Firefox.