Footnotes and DDA accessible pdfs

Question

I have been trying to make footnotes produce in InDesign readable, triggered by the footnote number within the text to no avail. These footnotes are not auto generated as I need full page width footnotes in a two column grid so are just paragraphs.
I have tried:
1     Tagging the paragraph footnote number as 'figure' with Alt text of the footnote copy.
2     Inserting the number into an anchored text box tagging as above.
3     Inserting the number as a picture into an anchored object box tagging as above.
Help please. Should one of these work or is there a work around?
Many Thanks
Pete Denly

Answer 1

petedenly wrote:
Many thanks Peter for this, I think that the same problem exists with cross-references as well!
Let me try and explain.
What I have been asked to do is produce reports that can also be read by a screen reader for non-sighted people.
The access tags available in InDesign generally work well with one or two exceptions - this being one of them.
When reading a paragraph with a footnote number in it, the reader just reads the text-number-text ok and then reads the footnotes at the bottom of the page as paragraphs following the rest of the page text.
What really needs to happen is that when the screen reader reaches a footnote number in a paragraph it should then read the footnote text before continuing with the rest of the paragraph.
Hence why I have tried inserting the footnote text as Alt = 'footnote text' in the position of the footnote number in the paragraph.
I hope that explains the problem better?
Any solutions?
Regards
Pete Denly
Hi, Pete:
You are describing changing the reading order within the PDF. I don't know if it's possible to make this happen automatically in InDesign.
A workaround would be to create cross-references to the footnote paragraphs immediately following the footnote reference numbers in the main text, so the screen reader sees the footnote text right after the reference. If you mark these "captured" paragraphs with a condition, you can hide or show them to create a normal PDF, and one for screen readers.
To avoid readers processing the footnotes, you can conditionalize, and hide their condition when you show their captured text in the cross-references. You can cross-reference to hidden conditional text!
Turning the conditions on and off will reflow your document significantly. I'm assuming that page layout isn't an important concern for screen-read documents.
When hiding footnotes, the footnote separator line remains. To remove it, you'd need to turn off Rule Above in the Footnote Options dialog box.
To manage making these variations of final output, you can create one template document for each variation. In this example, the template document for screen readers should have the footnote property of no rule above, and condition settings that display the cross-references that capture the footnotes in text, while hiding the footnotes. The template document for standard output should have the footnote property rule above set on (if you want it), and the condition settings that hide the cross-references and display the footnotes. The template documents don't need any content or layout. To bring the template document properties into your main document you can use Load Conditions and Sets from the Conditional Text panel menu. To do this for multiple files at once, create a book file for each output variation, add the appropriate template file and the rest of the document files to the book, choose the properties you want to load from Synchronize Options on the Book panel menu, then synchronize the book using the template file as the style source.
Because InDesign  can't load or synchronize footnote settings across documents - you have to do it manually - it might be more convenient to drag pages from the master document (the one that contains all conditions showing, and footnote rule above on) into each template document, where the condition and footnote settings of the receiving document will apply to the incoming pages.
HTH
Regards,
Peter
Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices
Message was edited by: [email protected]
Peter Spier suggested my posts on using cross-references while I was writing (and testing) this suggestion. I guess we share a wavelength as well as a first name<G>.