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Re: Captions and Alt-text

for

From: Duff Johnson
Date: Mar 1, 2013 8:03AM

Bevi,

> But this project was laid out in Adobe InDesign, which has a tragic
> shortcoming: items that are placed inside separate text frames (like
> captions) do not get tagged correctly in the exported PDF, so we end up
> fixing the tags by hand in Acrobat.

One of many many many shortcomings… yes. You'd think that InDesign would do a good job given that it's developed by the same company that invented PDF, but...

> Doing this for 300+ photos would be several days' worth of work.
>
> So I'm wondering if this workaround would really work for AT users:
>
> 1) Copy the caption text into the Alt-Text tag, and
>
> 2) Artifact the caption itself so that AT-users don't voice it twice.

This approach isn't great because some kinds of AT won't handle such a workaround very well - magnifiers (that use tags) won't see the caption, for example.

Do the captions not follow directly after the photos in the structure tree? If they do, then why wouldn't your originally proposed approach be acceptable?

Duff Johnson

Independent Consultant
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