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Re: Accessible PDF - syncing reading order and tags tree order

for

From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Jul 15, 2019 1:32PM

Christine, Have you tried using the articles panel in InDesign to affect the tag order? There are also some useful add-ones like Made to Tag.

Jonathan

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> On Jul 15, 2019, at 3:23 PM, Christine Hogenkamp < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
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>
>
> 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
>
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