By Jessica Cavazos, Health Educator, Minnesota Department of Health

Comprised of members from various Minnesota executive branch agencies, our InDesign Accessibility Community of Practice meets monthly to test and develop best practices for creating accessible PDFs from Adobe InDesign. We recently finalized a short how-to document, “Creating Accessible Documents in Adobe InDesign.” Our group members have rigorously tested these best practices to ensure they meet the State of Minnesota Digital Accessibility Standard. We also tested using methods including the Acrobat Accessibility Checker, reviewing with JAWS (a screen reading software), and CommonLook (a plug-in for Acrobat Pro DC which tests and remediates PDFs).

Some of the best practices include:

• Use Paragraph Styles to create the tag structure of your PDF, but don’t use them to change the look of your text.
• Use Character Styles to change the look of your text — font attributes (font, color, size).
• Have you struggled with your reading order even though you put everything in the Articles Panel? Turns out that reading order is dependent on how items are ordered in the Layers Panel as well as the Articles Panel. Creating Accessible Documents with Adobe InDesign provides more information to help you achieve proper reading order.

/mnit/assets/indesign-accessible-documents_tcm38-413703.pdfLearn how to create accessible documents in Adobe InDesign

We are currently working on a webinar series and a more detailed document to help users create accessible documents with Adobe InDesign. Stay tuned for more updates from us in the coming months!