Ajar Productions

Accessible PDFs from InDesign vs. Accessible HTML from InDesign

The article is written as a parallel to Adobe’s article on Creating Accessible PDFs, so that you can compare the steps required to set up accessibility for both PDF and in5, and to get a sense of the accessibility of the output.

For the purposes of this article, I will assume that you’re not interested in InDesign’s native HTML export, because it does not support layout the way a PDF does. In contrast, in5 exports HTML while maintaining your InDesign layout.

in5 is a 3rd-party InDesign plugin that can create accessible, interactive HTML output (without any coding on your part).

Both the PDF export and in5 can produce 508 compliant output from InDesign, but there are some key difference detailed in the article below.

Publish Online vs. in5 — Digital Publishing from InDesign Compared

Justin

in5 is the main alternative to using InDesign’s Publish Online. There are many ways that the two solutions are similar, but they are different in some very important ways.

Liquid Layout in Adobe InDesign: What is it Used For?

Justin

Liquid Layouts were an idea ahead of their time. They let you create “rules” governing how the items on your InDesign pages would scale and change position if the InDesign page were to change size.

This liquid ability was no doubt the InDesign team’s solution to a problem that was on its way: the mass availability of smartphones and tablets of various screen sizes, and the need to create digital content for these new devices.

The Liquid Layout feature pre-dated what would be the web’s solution to this problem: CSS Media Queries.

There’s a motto in investing, “being early is the same as being wrong.” Here, the InDesign team’s efforts were early, and Liquid Layout Rules do not map well to CSS Media Queries.