WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Accessible PDF - syncing reading order and tags tree order

for

From: Christine Hogenkamp
Date: Jul 15, 2019 1:22PM

Hello!

New to the list, hopefully it's ok for me to ask for help with an issue
I've noticed about doing accessible PDFs in InDesign/Acrobat.

So current practice is to create a document in InDesign, then reorder the
layers and add tags to document so that when the PDF is exported, the
reading order is correct. Some items may have to be adjusted for correct
tag types in InDesign or reading order adjusted in Acrobat using the
Reading Order panel, but largely this works fine for creating a PDF with
correct reading order.

Recently I have been learning NVDA to improve my understanding of
accessibility and I noticed that NVDA doesn't follow reading order, it
follows the tag tree order, which I had assumed follows reading order but
have discovered is not the case! As far as I can tell, if you tell
InDesign to add tags automatically to a document all at once after all
copy/elements are present in the file, those items will be listed in the
tag tree in the order of which they were added to the file itself. This
has nothing to do with layer order, so it makes sense that when exported,
the reading order and tag tree list are not the same, if InDesign looks to
layer order to determine reading order.

I know it's possible to manually drag and drop tags in the Structure/Tags
panel to be in the correct order from top to bottom, both in InDesign and
Acrobat, respectively. The problem is that sometimes we work on documents
that are 50+ pages long, so manually re-ordering the tag tree to get the
tag tree order correct would be tedious and time-consuming, especially
since the Tags panel doesn't separate anything by pages.

So I'm looking for solutions for being able to correct a long-format
document for tag order without having to fix the tags manually:

- Is there a way to force the tags to sync with the Reading Order panel?
It's much easier to get the Reading Order panel structured correctly and
would only have to be done once, if the tags could be synced up or linked
in some way (so if I move something in the Reading Order, it moves the tag
too)
- Are there any tools/plugins/add-ons to make Tag panel reordering less
tedious and not just drag and drop one at a time?
- Any other suggestions for a fix?

Thanks for reading!

--
*Christine Hogenkamp*
Front-end Developer

CONTEXT CREATIVE
317 ADELAIDE ST. W., #500 | TORONTO, ON CANADA | M5V 1P9
<https://maps.google.com/?q=317+ADELAIDE+ST.+W.,+%23500%C2%A0+%7C%C2%A0+TORONTO,+ON+CANADA%C2%A0+%7C%C2%A0+M5V+1P9&entry=gmail&source=g>