Paul,

Thanks for your response. Since Word treats these items as different, refusing to let me change the font on footnotes and main text simultaneously, there must be an MS Word code that tells the formatting code to skip the rest of the page one way or another so that it does not touch footnotes or somehow store footnotes in a way that they cannot be seen by the formatting code. Screen readers, at least the ones I know about, do not literally read the display. They read the text or HTML alt-text. Therefore, there is something in the MS Word encoding that tells whatever program is reading the text, including MS Word itself, to ignore the text that is not part of the main body of the document. That is not the screen reader's doing. It's Word's doing. If there was a way in MS Word to tell MS Word to treat footnotes the same way it treats the main text, e.g., select all at once, change the font all at once, this would not be a problem for my screen reader. It takes extra software for a screen reader to do OCR reading of a document and that is not what I'm asking for. Thanks.