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Re: Captions and Alt-text

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Mar 4, 2013 12:03PM

I've had a few responses to this problem directly from some list members, so
let me describe the problem with more detail for everyone.

Short demonstration:
The document has 2 paragraphs of body text, with a sidebar (boxed text in a
separate frame) anchored in between the 2 body text paragraphs.

Note that I'm using "sidebar" as the example here, but this applies to
anything in InDesign that requires a separate text frame, such as a small
photo caption, a long caption on a complex statistical graphic, pull quotes,
accessory text, or anything else that's not part of the full body text
story.

The final good code should look like this (I'm leaving out closing tags for
simplicity):
<root>
<sect>
<p>This is the first paragraph of body text.
<sect>
<h2>This is the heading of the sidebar.
<p>This is the sidebar text.

<p>This is the second paragraph of body text.

Instead, here's what is generated from InDesign:
<root>
<sect>
<p>This is the first paragraph of body text.
<sect>PathThis is the heading of the sidebar.This is
the sidebar text.

<p>This is the second paragraph of body text.

Essentially, everything inside the anchored sidebar is jumbled together
inside a <sect>/<section> tag and the individual tags for <h2> and <p> are
lost, as well as the concept of individual paragraphs of text that a user
would need to navigate the content.

In a PDF, the portion you see above in the demo - <sect>PathThis is the
heading of the sidebar.This is the sidebar text. - usually can't be accessed
by AT, so many AT users won't even know it exists.

Plus, <sect> tags are parent-level tags for organizing the content, not
intended to hold the actual live content. So this is a misuse of <sect>
tags.

For those using InDesign, this affects versions CS 5.5 and CS 6 (earlier
versions of InDesign do not have the tools needed to create accessible
documents).

We were told that Adobe's InDesign engineers would be addressing this
problem, but that was 1.5 to 2 years ago and still nothing.

This is not a small issue for graphic designers, and is preventing many
publications from being fully Section 508 compliant and accessible.

-Bevi Chagnon
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