Improvement Indesign Accessibility Features
I use Indesign to create accessible PDFs but there are a few features that should be there.
TABLES
Automatic Header Column and Header Row tagging. At the moment Header Column is recognized but not Header Row. If this was implemented you could go a step further and add ID tags and scope automatically. This would be a huge time saver since this all has to be done manually in Acrobat. It would also be nice to have an option to specify the Title of the table as a caption tag.
FOOTNOTES
At the moment you have to add the proper tags manually and move them to the proper place.
LINKS
Please add an Alt tag area when creating a link. Even word has that.
ARTIFACTS
For some reason even when you tell an object to be an Artifact in InDesign, it still comes out as an untagged element. This is a huge time sucker especially when it comes to large publications. Having to go through the Content pane in Acrobat marking unmarked elements is a pain! All lines, rules, and shading should automatically be marked as an artifact by Indesign.
ARTICLES
When you export a file to PDF and tell the Articles panel to Use the Reading Order in Tagged PDF, you still have to select all pages in Acrobat and tell it to Use Document Structure.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Telling your TOC to use proper TOC tags. I don't understand why this is not built into InDesign already.
Thanks for listening,
Shane
Shane Smith
shared this idea
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Mally
commented
Having this feature would increase my productivity.
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Savannah Taylor
commented
Hopefully Adobe realizes that this is a huge need in 2020 and they come out with some updates. I work at a web design firm and we spent almost a whole week trying to figure out the methods to make a pdf pass a AA ADA compliancy scan. Seems like most features you still have to do each time in Adobe Acrobat, which is a real waste of time, especially dealing with errors on a document that is updated monthly.
I'm glad you mentioned the issues with artifacts and articles above because I was losing my mind trying to figure out why my artifacts or articles were not carrying over into indesign.
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Anonymous
commented
As federal government employees, we still need the ability in InDesign to designate row headers, ID tags, and scope when creating tables. In addition, it would also be nice to have an option to specify the Title of the table as a caption tag and a way to include the table Summary. With all of the accessibility requirements needed for the federal government and their need to include and track data in tables, adding these features would be a huge time saver since this all has to be done manually in Acrobat.
As a federal employee who is responsible for designing many of the government publications, I know firsthand the cumbersome task of making tables compliant using InDesign and Acrobat. Just by adding these table updates, designing tables will be easier for everyone tasked with creating tables in InDesign.
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Anonymous
commented
As a Federal employee, I need this in order to comply with the law.
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Stefan
commented
I voted for that, however I’m not sure if it’s a good thing to have several a11y features in one post. As Bevi wrote some of the feature requests already found the way into ID.
To the Links part: Is it really the best approach to set a manual alt text for links. Besides a descriptive link text (WCAG), the link tag needs an alternate description in the Contents Key (PDF/UA). I know the MadeToTag plugin adds this alternate description to the contents key with the pattern "Linktext (Link)". I believe this makes sense and would be much more effective if this matter would be solved automatically.
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Bevi Chagnon | PubCom.com
commented
Update ver. CC:2019 / 14.1
TABLES:
YOUR VOTE IS NEEDED — We still need the ability to designate row headers, ID tags, and scope.FOOTNOTES:
Done in CC:2018!
Footnotes that are created using InDesign's footnote utility (or correctly created in Word and imported correctly into InDesign) are correctly tagged <Note>, and positioned in the reading order at the end of the paragraph.Done in CC:2019! Table Footnotes are correctly tagged and placed after the <Table> tag.
LINKS:
VOTE FOR THIS — We need to be able to add Alt-Text to hyperlinks.ARTIFACTS:
Be patient. This is being updated to comply with the forthcoming PDF 2.0 standard which will add the <Artifact> tag.ARTICLES:
VOTE FOR THIS — The Articles panel doesn't do everything we need it to do. The panel meeds some major revisions to meet our accessibility requirements.TOC:
Done in CC:2018!