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Re: Custom bullets in InDesign and Actual Text

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From: chagnon@pubcom.com
Date: Nov 9, 2022 10:27AM

Here's an update on this topic from my last post in 2013:

1. Nothing has changed in InDesign. (Ha ha, no surprise there!) We can't set Alt Text nor Actual Text on text, only on graphics, and the bullet characters and glyphs are text, not graphics.

Everyone is S O L on this point.

So because Adobe does not give us a way to add actual text to the bullet glyph, when we choose a custom glyph like U+25B6, many screen readers and text-to-speech technologies will voice its full Unicode name, "Black Right-pointing Triangle, blah blah. Black Right-pointing Triangle, blahdy blah blah." Etc.

Gah! Our poor end users!

2. Make sure your designers choose a Unicode glyph, not some ascii glyph from an old TrueType or PostScript symbol font.

3. Acrobat has beefed up its tools for PDF glitches like this one. In the Preflight tool panel, look for the tool to "Set Labels in Unordered List to Generic Bullet Character" which will put "bullet" as the actual text on all bullet glyphs. Then select "Fix" in the very lower right of the panel. (Please don't edit this utility.)

FYI, there are several more fix-ups like this one in Acrobat Pro's Preflight utility that clean up a whole lotta under-the-hood programming in PDF files so that they now pass not only Acrobat's checker, but CommonLook and PAC, as well. One click, give it a few seconds, and boom...done. For the entire file. Even if we could do this in InDesign, it's faster in Acrobat.

WebAIM doesn't allow attachments so I've uploaded a quick graphic of instructions to our tutorial-blog. It isn't glamorous, just functional. The tutorial is at https://pubcom.com/blog/tutorials/acrobat/preflight-bullets/

Hope this helps out you and your team, Christine!

Per the PDF/UA-1 standard, Actual Text on the glyph is the correct procedure. Most screen readers should, by now, voice Actual Text but you never know when non-compliant technologies are used.

But that's the responsibility of the assistive technology, not us content creators. Everyone in the food chain — you, me, the assistive technologies, the end users — all must follow the standards to make the system work.

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-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Christine Hogenkamp
Sent: Wednesday, November 9, 2022 11:01 AM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] Custom bullets in InDesign and Actual Text

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!

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

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