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Re: PDF language not recognized by screenreaders

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Jan 24, 2013 9:15AM

Gijs,

Thanks for looking into this - as a result of what you've pointed out we'll get the best practices documents updated to reflect the information more accurately.

If you haven't found this already, here's some additional information for you that may help.

InDesign doesn't have an explicit "document language" setting, but it is intuiting one from the default paragraph style language setting. To change the default paragraph style language setting, open InDesign but do not open any individual files. Go to the paragraph styles panel and edit the basic paragraph style's language setting. By doing this, the next time you create a document and export it to PDF, the document language will be what you set it to.

You still may have paragraphs or words within the documents that have a different language, but once you've set the default to Dutch (or whatever) every new paragraph will have that as the default, and you can change it if you need a paragraph style which is for French text within a primarily Dutch document.

It is worth noting that the PDF that is created will have the default language set in the tags for the first <document> tag, but the only languages that show up in the tags after that are for languages which are different from the default. For example, I set my default to Dutch and have three paragraphs and the 2nd paragraph has a different paragraph style and it is set to French. The PDF will have Dutch set on the <document> tag and French set on the second paragraph, but no language on any other tags as the Dutch setting on the parent tag for everything else cascades down so that everything else is in Dutch.

What isn't set is the document language setting as shown in the document properties. This is simple to do, but I completely agree that we need to simplify this process. I'll share this information with the InDesign team and work to get this addressed.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems

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