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Accessibility has come a long way since I learnt InDesign at uni years ago. Many features to make digital pdfs accessible are built-in, or there are small adjustments you can make to your design process that makes a big difference to someone who uses a screen reader.
But if you’re detail-oriented perfectionist like me (we should probably start a support group or something), then you’ll want to make sure you’re doing everything right. And it’s surprisingly difficult to find a comprehensive overview. So, to save you days of googling, here’s the basics of what I’ve learnt about making accessible pdfs from InDesign (the 2020 version).
Like I said, there’s a few small things you can do that makes a big difference to the accessibility of your document. The two biggies are adding alternate text to graphics and including tags.
Alternate text
People with vision impairment won’t know what the visuals are unless you tell them. By setting alternate text, the screen reader can describe any logos, photos or graphics on the screen.
Tags
Tags help makes sense of the hierarchy and order of text. For example, screen readers need to be told what’s a headline and what’s body text. It’s easy to do if you use paragraph styles (and if you’re not using paragraph styles then you’re doing InDesign wrong). Don’t be fooled by the Tags and Structure panels in InDesign. They’re only for XML tags and don’t effect PDF tagging.
These are things that you should incorporate into your normal design process. In most cases they actually make life easier anyway, and they have the added bonus of making pdfs more accessible. Win-win!
There’s a function for that
If there’s a function to do something in Indesign, use it. For example, if you’re creating a list, don’t insert a dash or bullet character and manually indent, use InDesign’s list function instead (remember, paragraph styles are your friend). Use header rows in tables and don’t just remove the stroke between table cells, merge them. Also, if it doesn’t need to be in a table, don’t put it in one. There’s functions for creating a table of contents and footnotes. Use them. Once you get used to doing things the proper way, it’s actually is much easier than those dodgy hacks you’ve been doing for years.
Get your life in order
Sometimes the reading order isn’t obvious to a screen reader – just imagine you’re a computer trying to figure out how to read a two-column page with a break-out box in the middle. So best practice is to always thread your text boxes together from start to finish. You can anchor elements (like graphics or that pesky break-out box) into text boxes so screen readers know where they fit into the flow of info.
If you’ve Googled reading order and got info about InDesign’s ‘Articles’ panel, I’ve got a tip for you. Ignore it. It’s supposed to set reading order but it doesn’t actually work (there goes 3 hours of my life). And new standards for screen readers means it’s becoming more redundant as time goes on. If you thread your text boxes and anchor other elements, reading order should be fine. If you’ve got something especially complicated, you can use the layer order to set the reading order. (Bottom-up. I know, it’s weird.)
As graphic designers I think we have a responsibility to consider disadvantaged audiences in our work. And given how easy it is to implement, there’s really no excuse to not make our digital pdfs accessible.
If you’re a nitty-gritty kind of person, stay tuned, my advanced tips are coming soon.
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