Adobe® InDesign® CS4 software supports accessible cross-media publication, allowing you to export InDesign documents to PDF, XHTML, and XML. Users can add tags and alternative text attributes to InDesign documents that support the production of accessible content in these exported formats.
Used in combination with Adobe Acrobat® software for touch-up of the exported PDF files and Adobe Dreamweaver® software for XHTML and XML output, users can achieve maximum accessibility for the exported content.
- Create tagged PDF documents
- Alternative text and actual text
- Exporting to accessible PDF
- Cross-media export to XML and XHTML
Create tagged PDF documents
Authors interested in producing accessible content with InDesign CS4 begin by adding structure to documents using the InDesign tagging facility. InDesign offers several ways to structure documents by adding tags. You can view the tags in an InDesign CS4 document using the Structure pane.
With InDesign CS4, you can create or load tags to identify each content element 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 that's 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.
Alternative 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 alternative text to the tag properties.
The alternative text attribute lets you create alternative text that can be read in lieu of viewing an illustration. ActualText is similar to alternative 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 alternative text or ActualText to figures in the InDesign document:
- Select the Figure element in the Structure pane, and then choose New Attribute from the Structure pane menu.
- For Name, type either Alt or ActualText (this feature is case-sensitive).
- 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 CS4, 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 alternative text or ActualText to be passed to the resulting PDF file.
Cross-media export to XML and XHTML
InDesign CS4 supports cross-media publishing by enabling 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.
