InDesign and PDFs

This section looks at the creation of accessible PDFs using Adobe InDesign. It outlines the key features PDF documents require in order to be accessible and answers the following questions:

• What makes a PDF accessible?
• How do InDesign and Adobe Acrobat work together to create accessible PDFs?
• What settings do you need to keep your InDesign accessibility features intact?

InDesign provides an easy work flow that saves time when creating accessible PDFs. Accessibility work should be done in InDesign, therefore reducing the amount of changes required later in Adobe Acrobat.

Features required in an accessible PDF

For a PDF to be considered accessible it should contain the following features:

• Good colour contrast ratio
• Clear, readable fonts and adequate line spacing
• Title meta data
• Table of contents
• Parent pages
• Logical heading structure
• Paragraph styles
• Character styles
• Threaded text frames
• Anchored graphics
• Properly formatted tables, lists, references and hyperlinks
• Alternative text (alt text)
• Bookmarks for longer documents
• Tags
• Logical reading order