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Custom bullets in InDesign and Actual Text

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From: Christine Hogenkamp
Date: Nov 9, 2022 9:01AM

Hello everyone,

I've been working on an interesting issue with our accessible PDFs that are
done in InDesign: Our designers want to create bullet lists that use
symbols other than the default bullet symbol. InDesign lets you replace the
bullet symbol to a custom choice in the Paragraph Styles Options but the
problem seems to be that these other symbols are obviously not named as
"bullet" in the Unicode (I think?) so screen readers don't announce
"bullet" but say "black square" etc instead. There doesn't seem to be a
place in the custom bullet options to set a specific name for the
replacement symbol.

So I was googling to try to find a solution to help keep the bullet
formatting intact so exported as <L>, <LI>, <Lbl> etc (and it's still read
out as "List of X items, bullet..." etc) and came across Actual Text, that
it's an option in both Acrobat to add to an object and in InDesign, there
is an Actual Text field under the Tagged PDF tab in Object Export Options.
I read the ISO 32000 PDF section about Actual Text and I believe our custom
bullet usage would be an acceptable use to replace single symbols in the
live text.

The issue seems to be that bullets are not objects in Indesign, they are
treated as part of the text within the text frame and InDesign doesn't
offer the Object Export Options window for text, only for images or other
objects.

I was reading Bevi's very helpful (as usual) post in the archives from back
in 2013 that indicated this has been the case for quite some time:
https://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?threadb03&id$502#post7

Does anyone know if Indesign has added a way to assign Actual Text to
bullets within a text frame?

Right now the options seem to be:

1. Convert each bullet instance into outlined vector objects which can then
be given Actual Text in the Object Export Options but this will end up
breaking the list formatting that Indesign exports by default for lists
made using their bullets and numbering tool. So the list tags would have to
be fixed in Acrobat, which adds extra work since list tags are a bit more
complex to get all the inner tags correctly set up.

2. Export the file as a PDF and use Acrobat to set the Actual Text for each
custom bullet symbol to say "bullet" in the Object Properties window.

I would prefer if these custom bullets could be formatted in InDesign,
ideally in a way that can be saved and reused so that our designers can set
them once in the file and then we don't have to do manual fixing in Acrobat
after exporting the PDF. But I haven't yet come across a good solution in
InDesign that doesn't end up breaking the default bullet list formatting.

So if anyone knows of a better solution for creating custom bullets in
InDesign that will keep the list formatting and allow control for how the
symbols are announced, please let me know.

And it would also be good to get confirmation that if we do go the #2 "fix
in Acrobat" route, is our use of Actual Text on these symbols to say
"bullet" the correct way to use the Actual Text option? I don't want to
tell our designers to use that option and then it turns out that JAWS
ignores Actual Text or similar (we don't currently have access to all the
popular screen reader apps to test with) and as always, I am a bit hampered
because I'm not a professional remediation specialist, I am just a
developer trying to help our designers use InDesign and Acrobat correctly
ha ha

Thanks!

*x*
*Christine Hogenkamp (She, Her)*
Front-end Developer
ContextCreative.com <http://contextcreative.com/>;

*We've moved! **Our new address is:*
*172 King St. E., Suite 300, Toronto, ON M5A 1J3*