Setting the Order for PDF Files in InDesign

For those of you who are creating accessible PDF files from Adobe InDesign, you know how powerful InDesign is for this task. One of the more frustrating aspects of PDF accessibility, is the fact that PDF files have two separate orders that could potentially be used by assistive technology to read the contents of a PDF file.

The most prominent screen readers in use today, JAWS and NVDA, choose to use the tag order in a PDF file as the order in which it reads and processes contents in a document. However other assistive technologies – those often referred to as text-to-speech software, often use the Reading Order in a PDF file as the order in which it reads and processes content in a PDF file. Check out the Chax Chat Podcast for episodes that discuss the use of tag order vs. reading order in a PDF file.

Now the great thing about Adobe InDesign, is that it does give us the ability to set both the tag order and the Reading Order in PDFs exported from Adobe InDesign. However the process can be quite mundane. First, you need to open the Articles panel and painstakingly add every object from every page into the Articles panel to control the tag order of content in the exported PDF file. Then you have to open the Layers panel in Adobe InDesign and painstakingly organize your content (from bottom up) to set the Reading Order in the exported PDF file. It’s a lot of work!

Last week we chose to set the Reading Order in the Layers panel of Adobe InDesign first. Completely by accident, we discovered that we could click on an object in the Layers panel and then using a handy keyboard shortcut that we added to InDesign, simply press a key to add it to the Articles panel. We could then click on the next object and add it to the Articles panel very efficiently. This process worked really well and it literally cut the amount of time it normally takes to set both orders in half.

Going through this process we realized that this process could be scripted! Scripting is essentially a way to automate tasks in applications to avoid having to do manual and mundane work. InDesign is an incredibly scriptable application by the way. Now full disclosure we’re not a scripters. Bu we know scripters! One of our good friends Keith Gilbert is an incredibly talented scripter that has built many solutions for us over the years so we gave him a call. We explained to Keith our idea and we went back and forth a bit about how the script should be implemented and then he told us that it shouldn’t be too hard to script. We hung up the phone and 3 hours later he sent the completed script! After a revision or two, we had a fully functioning script that basically adds everything from the Layers panel in InDesign to the Articles panel in the correct order!

If you’re an InDesign user, you’ll appreciate this script and understand how much time it can save especially for larger multi-page projects. Running the script is as simple as a double click and it takes seconds to execute. Huge timesaver! Keith has been kind enough to host this script on his website and make it available free of charge. Download the create article from layers script and install it in your InDesign Scripts panel to make it available for use.

We really hope you enjoy this script as much as we do. Feel free to send an email at chad@chaxtc.com with your thoughts and how useful you find the script. You can even make suggestions to make it better!