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Re: WAI documentsPDFs: Logical Reading Order and Tags

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From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Jun 3, 2016 7:51AM

You can use InDesign's articles panel to sequence text and graphic frames into an order of some sorts, but it only works on very short documents.

If you have a document longer than 1 page where one text thread continues onto successive pages, the Articles panel won't be much help because of how that panel sequences the items in it.

Example: My main story thread stretches across 10 pages and I put it in the Articles Panel. Then, if I add a sidebar on page 2 and add it to the Articles Panel, InDesign places the sidebar after the entire main story thread, that is, after page 10 is voiced out.

There are better ways to achieve the correct reading from InDesign. The Articles Panel can be helpful for short documents--very short documents. But for most normal projects done in InDesign, it's not useful at all. I teach my students and clients when it's useful, and then to not bother with it at all for other projects.

--Bevi Chagnon
PubCom.com

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Sophie Schuermans
Sent: Friday, June 3, 2016 3:22 AM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] WAI documents Re: PDFs: Logical Reading Order and Tags

Hi,

To obtain a logical reading order, your tags need to be in the right order.
To achieve that you can use the article pane in Indesign. This is described in this white paper and works fine:
http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/products/indesign/pdfs/indesign-cs55-accessibility-whitepaper.pdf
Look for 'Establish a reading order with the Articles panel'.
This document also explains how to map the paragraph styles to PDF tags (look for 'Add Export Tagging').

Best regards,

Sophie