FAQ

Yes. Adobe InDesign CC makes it easier than ever to apply accessibility features within your InDesign document, if the correct best practices are used. InDesign allows content editors to map common styles used to mark up the document to accessible tags. This tag structure can then be read by assistive technology when the document is exported to accessible PDF format. For example, styles can be mapped to headings, paragraphs, and tables. In InDesign CC, you can map paragraph and character styles directly to PDF tags to ensure that styles you define in InDesign are exported appropriately.

The new Articles panel allows you to choose and organize your content by dragging images, text frames and other content into the panel to define the order in which they will export.

InDesign also supports accessible content production in formats other than PDF including XML and Digital Talking Book.

Now you can more easily add, edit, and view Alt Text attributes that are associated with an image or object. For example, rather than creating new Alt Text, you can use description metadata that was added to an image in Adobe Bridge, or include Alt Text already attached to an object you imported from Microsoft Word. It’s also easier to add Alt Text directly in InDesign using the new Object Export Options dialog box.

Support for the following objects has been added:

• Tables and Nested Tables
• Lists and Nested Lists
• Footnotes
• Hyperlinks

In InDesign CC, you can map paragraph and character styles directly to PDF tags to ensure that styles you define in InDesign are exported appropriately.

The Articles panel and the ability to map styles to PDF tags let you ensure content flows in the expected order when viewers use screen readers and other assistive technologies.

Support for tagging allows a document to be exported as an accessible PDF document or as XML. This means that screeen reader users can recognize the different types of elements in the document, such as heading and figures. These tags also support the ability to provide accessible attributes to document elements such as alternative text descriptions for graphics that appear in the document.

There is no way to evaluate the tagging structure within InDesign. There are options for validating the tags that InDesign has placed in documents once they have been exported to other formats. For example, Adobe recommends using the Adobe Acrobat^® Professional accessibility checker to validate the tags in a PDF document.

For information on InDesign compliance with industry accessibility standards for electronic and information technology, consult the InDesign Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT).