Using Adobe InDesign to Create Accessible PDF Documents

>> Welcome to the 2019 DOI Section 508 Outreach Event. My name is Sid Sharma, I'm the DOI Section 508 program manager, and this event is hosted by the DOI Office of the Chief Information Officer.
So let's proceed to our next presentation using Adobe in design to create accessible PDF documents. Please join me in welcoming Ms. Colleen Gratzer; she serves as the accessibility specialist at Gratzer Graphics, LLC. Welcome, Colleen. [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you
>> Yaay!
>> Oh, over here. It's right here.
>> I got it. I got it, I'm good.
>> All right, thank you. So the first thing I want to point out is that if you're already using InDesign, and you're using InDesign best practices, and not doing things manually and taking advantage of the built-in InDesign features, then it's going to be a very small learning curve for you to incorporate accessibility. And if you're at a beginner level with InDesign, and not incorporating the best practices, it's going to be harder, because you're going to need to do those, as well as incorporate accessibility.
A very important rule is that you never want to format from the toolbar. So you always want to control all formatting with a style; whether that's a Paragraph style, a character style, Object style -- no overrides from the toolbar. So act like it's not even there anymore. Some accessibility tasks that you encounter, they might have more than one approach. It's not always a black and white approach. And others might require some creative thinking in order to accomplish them.
Now the first thing I'm going to start with is the Paragraph styles, because if you set your defaults when you have no documents open, you're going to really reduce the amount of work that's required every time you go to create a new accessible document. So I recommend, again, with no documents open, so they become your default styles, is to go and set all of your Paragraph styles. They don't have look pretty, they don't have to have the right colors or fonts necessarily. But just set these up. What I like to do is, have the basic paragraph just be the Basic Paragraph style, but you could also use a body text style, and then have an alternate one called "P-First Paragraph," and that is based on your body text paragraph. Then that's just formatted to perhaps not have an indent. However you want to do that, if you have a style that deviates for that paragraph. Then your headings, which I've named here, Heading 1, Heading 2 and Heading 3. Then bullets, like you might have bulleted lists, you might have numbered lists. I'm using the HTML tag for those, which is "LI" for "List Item." Then a block quote, then a note style that you can use for Footnotes, and the Table of Contents styles that you might need as well. So if you set these up, they'll always be there when you create a new document.
Now, the only difference is, from what you've been doing, is that you'll probably have to go in and just do this one extra thing, and that is to go to the Export tagging part of the Paragraph style options dialog box, and set the tag that you want that style to export as. I'm going to get into this more later, but so if your paragraph is text, it's regular body text; it gets formatted as a "P," which stands for the Paragraph tag. Your headings would be over here; those headings would be H1, H2, H3 through H6, okay, they all correspond. Then there will be some we'll have to set as Automatic, so we'll get into that more in a bit.
So again, here these are -- you set your basic paragraphs at the P, you set your Heading levels in the Export tagging. Set your bulleted list and number lists to Automatic, set your block quote to Automatic, and your Table of Contents to Automatic. Again, that's back in the Export tagging. That's going to define how the text will be tagged when it's exported to the PDF. Some styles that are set to Automatic might need to be manually changed later in Acrobat.
Now if you are familiar with the Based On feature, this will save you a ton of time. This will make things very efficient. In order to use the Based On feature, let's say you're going to duplicate the Basic Paragraph, so you would duplicate the Basic Paragraph, you would then rename that to whatever style you would like to make from that, so in this example, I've called it "P" for "Paragraph," "Drop Cap." So I've got "P" for Drop Cap. That's the new style name. Then you can just go into that style and style it with the Drop Cap features; you can make any other formatting changes to that. So that's how you would do that. So Based On means anytime that you change the style that it's based on, in this case the Basic Paragraph style, it's going to change any other style with it that is based on that style, unless you've already gone in and made changes. So you can do this with your headings, you can do this with list items, you can do this with any of your styles.
Now with the character styles, just like with the Paragraph styles, it's really helpful to go ahead and set these up with no documents open so that they become your default character styles. It's essential that you have a style -- I call it "No Break," because really, that's all it is -- so a style called "No Break," you literally just make a style and come in here and check this box here. That's your No Break style. If you don't want something to go to the next line, you have to use your No Break style, you can't go and insert a soft return, or anything. So that's what that'll be used for.
Any tracking, creating and tracking, you want to have a style for that. So you need to set up styles, I've got them as "Tracking -5," "Track -10," "Track -15." You don't want to go up to the toolbar and do any of that manual formatting. Also, an italics style, bold style, bold italics, subscript, superscript, and then a hyperlink and reference style. Then your document might require more styles than this, but these are a good default set to have.
Now if you use a lot of tables, then you can go ahead and you can create your default cell and table styles as well -- again with no documents open -- and then you can set the Paragraph styles that will be associated with them. The Object styles you could do this as well, so you could have default styles that are for a two-column text box, a three-column text box, a side bar, and then any rules or borders or lines, and then running heads and feet, and then an artifact style, which I will get into.
So Artifacting might be a new term for you. And artifacts are elements that are ignored by screen reading devices and other assistive technologies. They are elements that don't convey any important information, so they need to be artifacted. So you want to apply artifacting to Paragraph styles for any text elements that should be artifacted, and those would include page numbers and running headers and footers. Now to artifact, all you have to do is go into the Export tagging for those actual Paragraph styles, and then you set the Export tagging to artifact. And that means it's going to be ignored by the screen reader.
Now with Objects, you might have objects that need to be artifacted, and those are going to include decorative blocks of colors, decorative elements such as rules, and decorative background graphics. So those are all non-essential decorative elements. And in order to apply artifacting to the Object styles, you simply go into the Object style, go down to Export options, Tagged PDF, and then apply the artifact tag there. Okay? So it's a little bit different from the Text; you can do the Text one on the style, Object you can do it in the Object style. You can also artifact an element by right-clicking if you're on a Mac, if you're using PC you can control-click, and select Object Export options, and then select Tagged PDF, and then artifact.
Now there's a huge rule with accessibility, and that, you probably have heard, is that you cannot convey information by color alone. So in these two examples here, you know, if somebody has low vision, they might not be able to distinguish this blue from this black. These have the same treatment, same formatting colors, so even a sighted person can't see the difference between those two Heading levels, they're the same. So over here, here's an example of how we would fix this. This is bigger than this Heading, and then here, we've got a dashed underline here. So you want to make it obvious, so you can do that with not only the Export tags, but you could do that with the difference in size, difference in font weights, different font altogether, and the styling of it.
Then you need to check the contrast with a Color Contrast Checker. I like WebAIM, but there's tons of them out there. And you get your hexadecimal code, your six-digit color code, and you just come in here and type it in, and then put whatever the background color is going to be. So if there is no background color, you just have it as white. But anything that's going to have a background. So you could have colored text on a colored background. You have to check anytime that you have any interaction with color in the foreground and background.
So WCAG, which is Website Content Accessibility Guidelines, Level two-A requires a contrast ratio of at least four and a half to one for normal text, and three to one for a large text. Then Level triple-A, which is stricter, is seven to one for normal text, and four and a half to one for a large text. And they define large text as 14 points and bold, or larger, or 18 points or larger. So it's going to tell you if you pass or fail, depending on whether or not you need to go by WCAG double-A or triple-A here; so this might say "fail," the triple-A's might say "fail" and these two might say "pass."
Now when you create a new document, you can do this in several ways, so you can create it and check off the primary Text Frame, which will automatically create threaded stories. Then you can also create one frame per column of text, use a single frame per page, with multiple columns, or you can thread frames together. Then you can fill out any of your settings here like you normally do.
Now on the Master Pages, you want to add your Text Frames, but the Text Frames should reach to the pink and purple guide. So you don't want to have -- and here's your outer margin here, you don't want to have your Text Frame only going to here. If that's where you intend to have the edge of the Text Frame, you want to adjust the margin to where you want that Text Frame to be. So this needs to -- they need to match where they're going to align there. You want to avoid overriding master page items. You can create new nested Master Pages instead; it's very similar in concept, in theory, it's very similar to your Based On with text styles, because you're creating a new master, and it's based on another one. So in order to do that, you duplicate the master page, and then drag and drop one master over the other. So here's a new master B, and then you drag A over B. And then you go to B, and you Select All, and you delete everything that's on that, because you've just applied everything from A. So if you then change anything on A, like let's say you have running footers here with page numbers, and you've applied A to B, well now B has those same page numbers. If you go change where they are on A, it's going to have that same effect on B, because you've based B on A. You want to artifact any running headers and footers, either in the Paragraph style, or on the Text Frame with the Object style, and then rules and design elements get artifacted as well.
So when it comes to choosing typefaces, you want to choose OpenType fonts that use Unicode characters, for such symbols as a copyright symbol or fractions, otherwise you could end up in a situation where you've got 10 different fonts because you're trying to find the proper symbol. When you go to Import your text, if you do the style mapping, you could do the custom style mapping; here is your Microsoft Word document style called "Normal," map it to Basic Paragraph -- there is a Microsoft style called "Heading," You can map it to your H2, or something. That's going to prevent Word code from getting into the layout, and that causes a lot of problems. So you want to do that, as opposed to copying and pasting from Word, because that's going to bring a whole bunch of garbage with it. So you can also, when you're importing the text, remove the styles and formatting as well -- you have that option.
So when it comes to threading, this was a habit I had to get into when I learned how to do this, because I wasn't threading any of my frames. So it's very important to thread frames. So you can thread all of your Text Frames, or you can just thread certain sections. So in this particular example, here is a cover of an Annual Report, and it is not threaded to anything else, those are just by themselves. This is the Table of Contents, that's only threaded to itself; it's not threaded to any other piece of the document. You want to leave the Table of Contents unthreaded. Then in this situation, this would start a new thread here, so you can have pieces, the different sections, different chapters, each be threaded individually.
Once you've imported your text, you want to do a lot of cleanup, so you want to remove multiple spaces and paragraph marks. You want to remove any forced breaks; remember I said don't use a forced return. So you can use your No Break character style. Let's say you have something like a sentence, and at the end of the line you have a measurement. Let's say it says "5 lbs," and you just don't want "lbs" down at the next line. You could use the No Break character style and apply that for the words "5 lbs," and that's going to keep that together always. It's not going to cause any accessibility issues, and it's not going to cause that forced line break, which would cause accessibility issues. You'll want to remove tabs, unless you're going to end up taking tabbed content and then creating a table from it. Then you'll need to rekey anything that's in all caps unless it's an acronym, because anything that is all caps and typed that way is going to be read that way, and that means letter by letter. So if you need to style an acronym, like USA -- that's fine. That can be keyed in as "USA," and it should be. But if you have all caps text, let's say it's, like, a brand name, and that's how they write it, but it's pronounced like a normal word -- then you would have to rekey that in regular case and apply an All Caps style. So it's okay to style it that way. It'll still look the same to everybody else, right, but it's going to be treated differently when it's read out by assistive technology.
Now if there are -- well, I see this a lot with clients, I'm sure you'll encounter this too -- hyphens that should be en and em dashes -- so there should be the proper dashes; en dashes for a range of numbers, you know, 1 to 10. You could also alternatively just write out "one," and the word "to," "ten," "one to ten." Em dashes would be a mid-sentence break. Usually a lot of clients will use double hyphens to intend an em dash, so you would change the double hyphens to an em dash. And you want to check that any special symbols, any measurement symbols, copyrights or fractions, all of those, conveyed when they got imported into InDesign. Then in tables, you want to remove blank rows and columns and merge cells where needed. One thing you can do with things -- if you have blank cells that need to be blank cells, you can just put a dash in there to signify that it is intentionally empty. So like I said in the beginning, control everything with a style. Don't format from the toolbar, and don't do it from the keyboard, either. So don't do any manual formatting. Format everything with a style.
So like I mentioned earlier, you want to create new Paragraph or character styles that are based on other styles, if you need to make an adjustment, including tracking, so that you don't have any overrides anywhere. You should never have any overrides anywhere. So let's say we have Heading 3, and let's say it starts at the bottom of the page, and we really want it to go to the next page. Well, we don't want to insert a Page Break, we don't want to insert multiple returns. So the solution is to create a new style called "H3 Next Page," because trust me, you could end up with a whole bunch of these; you want to know what you did with them. So "H3 Next Page," and all you're going to do is go into that style, and tell it to start on a new page. It could be a new column, it could be a new Text Frame -- whatever you need it to do. And call it that so you can go back and tell what you did later. But that's what you'd want to do, as opposed to inserting line breaks, or multiple returns. You will find yourself doing this with quite a few styles; I mean you could have, like up here, I have an example with P-Indent, so Paragraph Indent. If you needed an entire paragraph to be tracked -10, you could create a whole new style for that as well.
And this is the override button up here, so while you're doing the layout, you want to have that checked, and make sure you're not in Preview mode. Then you'll be able to see, and it will be highlighted for you, any style overrides throughout the document. And those are the ones you need to address.
So you want to set the Export tag of the Paragraph style of the document title as H1; so Heading 1 is the highest-level Heading, Heading 6 is the lowest. Then you want to style your chapter or section titles as H1's, or H2. So H1 can be a document title, it could also be the title of a new section, or an H2 could be a title of a new section as well. And you always want to make sure that you use them in the correct sequence, you don't want to skip any, and you don't want -- so you don't want to go from an H2 to an H4. So here we have H1, H2, and we go to an H3, H3, come out to an H2 -- you don't want to skip from an H2 to an H4 because you just like the way H4 looks. You want to make a new H3, in that case.
You also can take advantage of the Paragraph style options, like Spanning Columns, Paragraph Shading, and Paragraph Rule -- those can be very efficient. Now when it comes to graphics, you want to anchor your images in the text at the end of the paragraph in which they're mentioned. This was hard for me to have to change. So then you can apply your Object styles. So here is where this image is anchored; so you anchor it, and then you can move it to wherever you'd like it to be on the page, and you could apply an Object style to that. If you have some text there that's referencing, like in this particular case, it could say the photo at right -- you want to change that and give it an absolute reference instead of a relative reference; so you could say "Figure 1," or give it another title.
Alt-Text is important, because images and images of text cannot be read by screen readers. So Alt-Text is in place of these images. What you want to do is -- so if you don't have artifacted images, you need to add the Alt-Text. So you're going to right-click or control-click in front of the PC, and then Select Object, Export options, and then you select Custom here. And when you do that, you can add your Alt-Text right here. It should say what the image contains, like what it's a picture of, and any key visual elements. So you might have an infographic or a bar graph, pie chart or something, and you can explain what is in it, what the data is. Or it might be a photo of something. You don't need to give more information than a sighted reader would get, though. And you don't want to repeat the same info that's in the caption, because that means somebody's going to hear that information twice, and that's annoying.
Now for the infographics, explain what they represent, and provide the data, if it's short. If it's not short -- I mean, I've worked with infographics and pie charts that have so much data they can't possibly be explained in the Alt-Text. So what you can do is, you can link to an online source that might appear; like you might have something in the document that's like an appendix, or you might have an online source, like a website that's showing that data. And that has it explained out on there. So you could provide that. You would want to provide the link in the text, though, not in the Alt-Text.
Now when it comes to graphs, charts and maps, these can be tricky. They can require a lot more attention to ensure not only sufficient color contrast between text colors and their background colors on the map, but also to distinguish between each other. So in the pie chart, for example, or a bar graph, you can check the contrast with a Color Blindness Simulator. I like the Coblis one. What it does is, you upload a picture, and then you can see it as normal, and then it shows as different levels of color blindness, so you can see if some of your colors are going to be too close together and not enough contrast in certain situations.
Since you cannot convey information by color alone, if the contrast is not sufficient to distinguish the various elements by color, you must use other means. So you can use lines with shapes in a line graph. So up here, these lines might not have enough contrast between them, so what you could do, maybe the light blue lines have triangles at each point, and maybe the darker blue line has squares at each point. Then the third one has diamonds. You could also use different patterns, if it's a like a pie chart or a bar graph here, you could have different patterns to distinguish, because this is not necessarily distinguishable. And with maps, any text that appears on top of the map, you'd want to make sure that's in a contrasty-enough color, or it's bold, and you can add a drop shadow to that text in order to make it stand out from the background on the map.
Now with tables, you want to anchor the table in the text. So in this example, this table is in its own box, because it's a one-column table on a two-column page, and so this Text Frame containing the table is anchored over here. Then you placed the table's title outside of the table, and you can go ahead and style your table headers in here, and style table cells with your paragraph cells, and have the export tagging set to Automatic. So then you'd need to make sure that that's an actual Header row -- so if you right-click it and it says, "Convert to Header row," that means it's not a Header row yet. You have to make that a Header row, it needs to be a proper Header row. And then again, you want to remove blank rows or columns, and then you can put any Footnotes after the table. So in Creative Cloud 2019, it'll place the Footnotes at the bottom of the frame that holds the table, which should be in its own frame, so it will place them down here under that. You don't want to span your tables across two pages, unless you're using a Text Frame with columns. So if you have a two-page spread, you could have -- well, if you had a two-page spread, you could have one Text Frame, but it would have to be in two columns across the spread. You can't just have a one-column table across that. It won't read properly when it's exported in the PDF. And it's okay to place the table in its own frame anchored in the text, which is what I'm showing here. And it is okay to use the View > Rotate Spread feature to accommodate wide tables. I've run into this situation quite a bit where I need to have just the pages with these tables horizontal, just so I can accommodate more columns. So that's okay to do that.
Sidebars -- when you create Sidebars, and you can create Object styles for Sidebars -- you create them and do the same thing, anchoring them in the text at the end of the paragraph in which they're mentioned. So here is where the Sidebar appears, but it's anchored up there in that paragraph. And you'd want to style your Sidebar titles as an H2, or another level of Heading, that's based on the logical order in which it falls in the section. So if this isn't a section, like I said, you could use an H1 or an H2 for your chapter title. So if you have an H3 later, another level of subheading, and it's in that section, then this would be an H4 level Heading. So you want to make sure your hierarchy is always there -- H1, H2, H3, H4 through 6.
Okay, and then you can use Apply Next Style under -- this is really cool, by the way, if you try this out, it's really cool. You can use the Apply Next Style under an Object's Paragraph style to style multiple paragraphs at a time when the next style has been set. So if we have a style called "H2 Sidebar," and we say -- okay, here's our Based On, but if we say Next Style, use "P Sidebar," you know, Paragraph Sidebar. Then when you go to create the Object style and you tell it, okay, I want this style to be "H2 Sidebar," and I want you to apply the next style -- when you go to apply the Object style to the Sidebar, it's going to format this and this, because it knows to apply this style -- and by the way, it knows to apply that style, too, because it's set up here and here. You could actually end up with a Sidebar that only is one paragraph long, and you wouldn't even need to have an Object having its own frame with an Object style -- that could actually be something that you use just by using the Paragraph Shading in the Paragraph style.
With Hyperlinks, you want to make sure that all of your hyperlinks are clickable, so that's going to be websites, emails, any Footnotes. You have to link all your Footnotes as well. So you can go to Hyperlinks and Cross References, and then Convert URLs to Hyperlinks. Then you can create Hyperlink Destinations for your cross references. Then you go to where they are in the text, highlight them, and add that link to them. Okay, so over here, here's the Hyperlinks palette, here is the Footnote number. That's showing an anchor, and it's linking down here to this. It's actually linking to that. So in the PDF, if I click on this, it actually will go to that.
Now with the Table of Contents, you always want to use the Automated feature -- no manual Table of Contents. So you want to set up your Paragraph styles, and when you set up those Paragraph styles, again, it's back to creating Paragraph styles, set that Export tagging of the Table of Contents title as an H2 -- but the regular Table of Contents text, so if you have the Heading in your Table of Contents, it's okay that that's an H2. But your regular Table of Contents text should be set to Automatic. So you'll then use the InDesign features to create that Table of Contents; it's going to make it clickable in the PDF, which is fantastic, and it'll also -- if you check this, it will create PDF Bookmarks as well. So that's really cool, because that will add bookmarks for your cover, your chapters, all of your sections, just simply by checking that box. So when you get into the PDF, it's going to have all your bookmarks there, if you show them. And then in your title, if you want to call that "Contents," or if you want to call it, "Table of Contents" -- whatever you want to do -- do that in there, and then if you ever have to redo your Table of Contents later, that's already done. You don't have to go change that again. So do as much of this in here, do all that automation in here.
Now Reading Order means that all the text in the document needs to have a logical reading order. So what you see in InDesign is not necessarily the order that it's going to be read in the PDF by an assistive device. Okay, so we might see that's above that, so that's going to get read first -- not necessarily. So there's a few different ways to do this. In the Articles panel -- back to my example before this, Cover is by itself, this Table of Contents is by itself. Then this is the start of the rest of the document. So you actually go to these different pieces, these different pieces that you've threaded, and you drag them into the article's panel. So in this situation, I have literally dragged that Text Frame over here, the 2018 to here, dragged that frame that says "Annual Report" into here, and I called this, "Cover." So that's the Cover section. Here's the TOC section, just literally drag this one. You don't have to drag both frames. If they're threaded, you just drag one frame. It doesn't matter if I drag this one, or if I drag this one. Drag it over, and then you can see that's the Text Frame that it's reading from. Then the main story, which is the rest of it, just drag this first box here, because everything after that is all threaded. Then when you go up to this little menu here, it will give you the option for Use for Reading Order in the Tagged PDF -- you want to make sure that is checked.
The other way that you can re-order items if you need to is -- and this is a different way, so you might need to do both -- in the Layers panel, everything is read from the bottom up. So if you're using more than one layer, it'll be more obvious, but sometimes you have to open these up, because if you're using one layer with a lot of different elements there, you might need to go in and rearrange them. So for example, this Text Frame is separate from this one, so 2018 -- like I said, it appears above Annual Report, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to get read that way in the resulting PDF. So 2018 is going to get read first, because it appears below the Text Frame that contains Annual Report. So again, Layers panel gets read from the bottom up -- so 2018 gets read before Annual Report, okay? Even though this is up here in the layout and this one's here, this is what matters. If the 2018 were above this, it would actually be in the wrong reading order. It would still look the same here, but it wouldn't be read properly in the PDF.
So the Articles panel is read from the top-down. It's going to read the Cover first, which is this section, with this and this; the 2018 and Annual Report. Then it's going to read the Table of Contents section, which is this frame, and then it's going to read the main story -- which this is just the beginning text, but that's the rest of the document text. Then again, Layers panel is read from the bottom to the top. A lot of times, if you find some things you need to adjust in the PDF, you have to come back and look at that Articles panel and that Layers panel, and see why something's out of order, that's usually where that stuff happens.
Now your Metadata, you can add this anytime in InDesign. It's best to do it in InDesign before you get to the PDF, because if you have to troubleshoot in Acrobat and come back and re-export stuff from InDesign, you're going to have to redo all that Metadata again. So if you just put it in InDesign, it's going to be there. So you'll fill out the title, the author, description, and the keywords. The description field will get read by search engines, so you want to make sure the first 150 or 200 or so words, that those first words are the most important. You can also add in as many keywords as you want in the Keywords field; again, that's going to get read by search engines. Then don't use an ampersand if the title is using the spelled out word, "and," up in the Document Title field. And you can fill out the other fields as well, but those are the ones that you definitely want to fill out.
When you're doing your preflight, you want to preflight, make sure all of your images are linked, you want to make sure that your hyperlinks are all okay, because if they're not, these will show up as red, they're broken links, and then you would need to replace those with proper links that work. So you preflight as usual, like, before printing. Then you want to turn on that Style Override Highlighter -- that's what I mentioned earlier -- and check for any style overrides that are highlighted in the text, and you want to address those with a new style, if needed, or override their formatting with that button. See, up there is how it would look. If this was not following a style, it would be highlighted like that.
Then you want to check your tags by going to the Paragraph styles palette, clicking here, and then Edit All Export Tags. Then you want to make sure you click on PDF, and then check all of these. So Basic Paragraph, the HTML tag associated with that is a P. I like to put all the tags in the beginning, so it's very easy to come here and check them. So that's a "P," that means it's a body text style of some sort -- so those are all P's. H1 gets an H1, H2 gets an H2, H3 gets an H3, and so on. Bullets -- those are always left as Automatic. This would be a situation that needs to be changed to the P-tag, as with this one. So then you can go ahead and export your PDF, and you can choose the interactive setting. And you want to make sure that you Export as Pages, not Spreads, because it will change the reading order. Then the other think you can do is check off Single Page for Layout, and then Create Tagged PDF, and Use Structure for Tab Order. Then if you have any Forms and Media -- that would be buttons, like if you have buttons or forms, you want to make sure that you include those as well. What you can do is, you can go and create this Export setting, and then save it as a preset, so you always have it. You don't have to come in and change it all the time. Just save it once.
So for your compression settings, you want to set your resolution, so your downsampling resolution, you can set that to 144, 150, 200 or 300 -- it depends on the type of images. See what you get when you Export it. But I have noticed that one time I exported a PDF, I made some tweaks in Acrobat, I got it all ready to go, and the client was, like, "I thought the resolution was going to be higher." So in that case, I would have had to go Export with a higher resolution, and go and redo everything I had just done in Acrobat. So it's a good idea to get that approved at that resolution that you're planning on using before that happens, so you don't have to go back and get all of that redone. You can also increase the image quality setting if you want to. But the higher the resolution, the greater that file size is going to be, so if this is something that is going to be emailed, you have to take that into consideration. You might have to give a little bit of quality, so you have a reduced file size. Then if you're going to also print this, you want to make sure that you export a separate PDF for printing, with the proper print settings. And the other thing I do is change the hyperlink style to not show hyperlinks -- underline the hyperlinks in the print version.
Okay, so then you go to Acrobat with this PDF. Now if you did not check the Use Structure for Tab Order, then you can go to Organize Pages in Acrobat, Select All, and then go to Page Properties and click on Use Document Structure, so you don't have to go back and redo the whole thing again, you could just fix that right there. Then you want to run a full accessibility check in Acrobat. So if you see some issues, then you want to check certain things, like Edit the role map -- so if you go in Acrobat, you click on the tags here, then Edit Roll Mat -- you will see how these styles are being interpreted here with these tags. So normal Paragraph style is a P, P, after a list -- different things like that. Then you want to troubleshoot and go back and fix issues in InDesign, if you need to. Again, you might need to go back to those Layers and Articles panels, and check the order of those, check the order of the individual elements on those Layers. Then you would re-export your PDF, and redo steps one and two. You also want to check your Metadata, and sometimes you'll find a semicolon that appears in the keywords in the description, so you want to take that out. Then in File > Properties, you can set the Initial View to the Bookmarks Panel and Page so that your bookmarks will show on the left hand side when somebody opens that PDF. And you can also then go in and change this to a two-up spread, if you want to do that here. You just don't want to Export it that way in InDesign, but you can change it to that here. Then just save the PDF.
Now there's a bug with using custom Unicode characters for bulleted lists; I ran into this the other day, that was fun. It will give you a double span tag in Acrobat, in the PDF. And it will cause that bullet character to be voiced twice. Then it was adding a space between the bullet -- or causing the space between the bullet and the text to appear first, instead of the bullet coming first. So it's space-bullet, instead of bullet-space-text. That's, again, if you're using a custom Unicode character instead of the default bullet. So the solution is to use the boring default bullets. If you are going to use a custom bullet, you can artifact that space's span in Acrobat, but that might be a lot of work, depending on how many lists you have with those. Or you could allow the double voicing of the bullet. It's not a barrier to accessibility, but it's a nuisance. You can actually go and vote for Adobe to fix these, and some other bugs, at the InDesign.uservoice.com website. Then you can visit PubCom's webpage, which is a link in your PDF, to learn which items to vote for. PubCom is who trained me three years ago in accessibility with InDesign.
Okay, so then my company is Gratzer Graphics, and we do branding, publications and accessibility work. And my other company is Creative Boost -- I have a lot of resources for designers, and the Design Domination podcast. And that's it -- Creative-Boost.com. And then PubCom, like I said, who trained me in accessibility with InDesign, is PubCom.com. These are all linked in your PDF as well.
Okay. Questions? Yes?
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> Org charts? Uh-huh?
>> Yeah, and I've confirmed the PDF, as some people don't have Vizio, and stuff like that. Sorry, I put org charts on our webpage, you know, some people see the structure of who's the boss, and things like that.
>> Right.
>> But I put them in there as PDFs because a lot of people don't have Vizio.
>> Right.
>> So is there a way to also check that for accessibility? Do I just run some kind of PDF scan for the chart as well? Or, I'm not sure how I would do that.
>> You're creating it in InDesign?
>> I have never heard of InDesign before, so no. These are our -- we have an inside Indian Affairs webpage that we use here at Interior.
>> Yeah, so if you're not starting with InDesign, I'm not quite sure what to tell you, then.
>> Oh, okay. I guess that's why we have IT, I guess.
>> I'm sorry, let me try to tackle that. You said that you work for Indian Affairs? Is that right?
>> Yes.
>> Okay. So have you reached out to your 508 coordinator, Tony Morris?
>> Yeah, I'll follow up with him.
>> Yeah, he may have some ideas.
>> Okay.
>> If not, then send me an email and we'll try to research that for you. Okay?
>> Okay, thank you.
>> Yep, you're welcome.
>> Yes?
>> If you have tables --
>> Please wait for the mic, please.
>> If you have tables that need to be blank, what would be the difference in putting a dash -- or you said you have to put something in there.
>> Oh, if you have table cells that are blank?
>> Yes.
>> Yeah, I would just probably put an en dash or a hyphen, or something like that. That's what I've used, and that's worked.
>> If you were to leave it blank, how would it be read? Or would that cause any problems?
>> Yeah, I don't know exactly how it gets read. I mean, I was taught to put something in there, to note that it is intentionally left empty. So I'm not quite sure what happens otherwise. Then it might cause problems with it being read, if it's just left empty.
That can't be all the questions. I saw some quizzical faces.
>> We have a question in the Chat.
>> Oh, there's a Chat?
>> Are links to possible test documents that we can work with and follow the instructions given in the presentation, are they provided with materials that are being sent out, I think?
>> No. What I created was just a clickable PDF version of this, so you'd be able to reference this. But there's not additional documents with it.
>> Oh, okay, yeah. Since it was a very thorough tutorial, I thought something -- it would be helpful if we had something that we could work with as just practice items in InDesign to follow along with that, and get a muscle -- build muscle into memory.
>> So what I would suggest for that is to go ahead -- so with the default styles, you could go ahead and create those on your own with no documents open and get that out of the way. Then for a practice document, you could just fill a Text Frame with placeholder text. Then just go in and start using some of those styles, like the H1, H2, and format some stuff, and just add a Sidebar, anchor an image, and then play around with that.
>> All right, yeah, that should be helpful with developing those skills.
>> Email me if you have some questions about it.
>> We've had a bunch just pop in from the field. What is meant by "threading?"
>> Okay, so threading is when you're linking your Text Frames together. So in this example, this first page of the Table of Contents, it's threaded to that second frame.
>> Okay. The next one is, other than best practices, what effect can overrides have on a 508 document?
>> It can cause errors, it can cause issues with it being read.
>> And the third one says, it sounds to me like consistently using styles and other methods you're telling us to use not only ensures the XML works right, but the InDesign document works with Typefi too. T-Y-P-E-F-I.
>> What was it again? I have no idea what that is. I don't work in XML, and I don't know what that other one is. But if you format something for accessibility, it makes for a very clean document that you can then take with little effort to create an epub, and any other kind of documents, because everything is formatted properly. Not just in terms of visuals, it's properly formatted in terms of the hierarchy of the document, and that makes it easier to be read properly by any device.
Any more questions? You can always send me an email if you think of something later.
>> Okay. Thanks very much.