Conditional Formatting

Conditional formatting is a spreadsheet feature that automatically applies visual styles — fill color, font color, bold text, icons, data bars — to cells whose values meet specified rules (for example, highlighting failing grades in red or above-average sales in green). It is widely used to make patterns visible at a glance but is a significant accessibility barrier for screen reader users, because the meaning encoded in color and style is not announced during cell-by-cell navigation unless the user explicitly queries formatting attributes. This makes conditional formatting outputs from generative AI particularly hard to verify without sighted assistance, since both the formatting rule and the resulting visual pattern must be checked.