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Re: Custom bullets in InDesign and Actual Text

for

From: chagnon
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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