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Re: PDF language not recognized by screenreaders

for

From: Duff Johnson
Date: Jan 23, 2013 8:54AM

> Thank you Duff. You've pointed me in the right direction.

You are welcome.

> InDesign automatically assigns a language to a paragraph style.
> Since my version of InDesign is English, it's set to English UK.

There we have it...

> In conclusion:
> According to Adobe, setting the language of the PDF on the document level in Acrobat, should do the trick.
> This is false.

Well… not exactly.

It's true in cases where (a) the content and (b) the tags themselves do NOT have language attributes set, which is most of the time (except where InDesign is concerned, of course).

> The language properties on content level overrides the language on document level.

Yes, and it's correct that they should do so.

That said, software that allows the user to set the language property for the whole document should be smarter than to allow such confusion to (understandably) propagate. For example, it would be helpful if when setting the global language the user was advised of content-level language settings and was provided the option to replace such settings.

> As always, making sure the source document is correct (in this case the language of Paragraph Styles in InDesign) avoids problems later on.

As always… ;-)

Duff Johnson

ISO 32000 Intl. Project Co-Leader, US Chairman
ISO 14289 US Chairman
PDF Association Vice-Chairman

+1 617 283 4226
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http://duff-johnson.com