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Adobe InDesign CS3 accessibility

Create tagged PDF documents

Authors interested in producing accessible content with InDesign CS3 begin by adding structure to documents using the InDesign tagging facility. InDesign offers a number of ways to structure documents by adding tags. You can view the tags in an InDesign CS3 document using the Structure pane.

With InDesign CS3, you can create or load tags to identify each content element that you want to export or import. Then tag text or page items using one of these techniques:

• Add untagged items
  If necessary, choose View > Show Structure to display the Structure pane, and choose Window > Tags to display the Tags panel. Choose Add Untagged Items from the Structure pane menu.
• Manual tagging
  Select a frame or text and then click a tag in the Tags panel, or simply drag a tag from the Tags panel to a text or graphics frame.
• Automatic tagging
  Select a text frame, table, table cells, or image, and then click the Autotag icon in the Tags panel. Items are tagged according to your tagging preset options.



• Map styles to tags
  Paragraph styles and character styles you assign to text can be used as a means of tagging paragraphs and text for XML. For example, a paragraph style called "Caption" can be associated with a tag called "FigureName." Then, using the Map Styles to Tags command, you can apply the FigureName tag to all text in your document assigned the Caption paragraph style. You can map more than one style to the same tag.



• Map tags to styles
  Associate tags with paragraph, character, table, or cell styles, and then apply tags automatically to text, a table, table cells, and paragraphs that were assigned those styles.

Alt text and actual text

If you want screen readers to describe graphical elements that illustrate important concepts in the document, you must provide the description. Figures and multimedia aren’t recognized or read by a screen reader unless you add alternate text to the tag properties.

The Alt text attribute lets you create alternate text that can be read in lieu of viewing an illustration. ActualText is similar to Alt text in that it appears in lieu of an image. The ActualText attribute lets you specify text that is rendered as an image.

Assuming your InDesign document has been tagged, do the following to add Alt text or ActualText to figures in the InDesign document.

1. Select the Figure element in the Structure pane, and then choose New Attribute from the Structure pane menu.
2. For Name, type either Alt or ActualText (this feature is case-sensitive).
3. For Value, type the text that will appear instead of the image.

Exporting to accessible PDF

You can export a document, a book, or selected documents in a book as a single PDF file. When you export an InDesign file to PDF, you can preserve accessibility information and structure that was present in the InDesign document as well as navigation elements, such as table of contents and index entries, and interactivity features, such as hyperlinks, bookmarks, media clips, and buttons.

When exporting to PDF from InDesign CS3, verify the Create Tagged PDF checkbox is selected in the Options section of the Export Adobe PDF dialog box. This will preserve the tagging that was established in the InDesign document and allow Alt text or ActualText to be passed to the resulting PDF file.

Cross-media export to XML and XHTML

InDesign CS3 supports cross-media publishing by allowing you to export structured InDesign documents as XML or XHTML.

Export to XML

For advanced repurposing workflows, export the content from InDesign in XML format, which you can then import into an HTML editor such as Dreamweaver.

Export to XHTML

Export a selection or the entire document to a basic, unformatted HTML document. You can link to images on a server or create a separate folder for images. You can then use any HTML editor, such as Dreamweaver or Adobe GoLive® software, to format the content for the web.