I often get asked about accessibility and 508 compliance.

In this article, I’m going to demystify this topic by doing the following.

1. Explain accessibility and 508 compliance in simple, straightforward terms
2. Provide some general strategies for improving accessibility in your HTML content
3. Provide some specific strategies for exporting accessible, 508 compliant HTML from InDesign using in5

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Way back in 2008, I wrote my first InDesign extension at the behest of then InDesign Product Manager, Michael Ninness.

The MergeText Frames extension combines multiple textframes into a single frame so that your text can easily be edited.

This is especially useful if you’re using the PDF2ID extension from Recosoft.

It was wonderfully promoted by the community and has been one the most popular items on my site ever since.

Why update it now?

There are two main reasons that I’m releasing this update.

1. The extension is still useful and these feature requests continue to come in.
2. I can apply my years of experience to improve the script. 🙂

What’s new?

There are three main, major changes in this update.

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I’ve heard from a few people lately asking for introduction to in5.

This post has some resources to help you go from “zero to hero.”

I’ll explain what in5 does and how it can help you publish yourAdobe InDesign content online.

The 30-Second Version

in5 lets your export your layout, animation, and interactivity directly from InDesign.

in5 uses InDesign’s own interactive features, so you can focus on your design, instead of learning how to use unfamiliar software.

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A lightbox—which opens on top of the site (or app) that you are currently viewing—is a great way to load external content, but remain on the same page once the content is closed.

As a designer, a lightbox is a useful tool to keep readers in your “experience” and not force them to find their way back to your page.

Technically speaking, a lightbox loads external content into an <iframe>.

in5 (InDesign to HTML5) let’s you add lightboxes with a single checkbox—no coding or hassle required (and no thinking about iframes)!

The Problem: iOS, Lightboxes, and Multipage PDFs

A handful of in5 customers found that when loading multipage PDFs into a lightbox on iOS devices (iPads and iPhones), you can’t navigate to the second page.

This happens in part because iOS has a PDF viewer built into the web browser.

Normally, the built-in PDF view is quite handy, but when it’s loaded into an iframe, you don’t have access to the page navigation.

Google Drive to the Rescue!

Fortunately, if you

1. upload your PDF to Google Drive and
2. grab a shareable link; the

Google online PDF viewer will let you navigate through all the pages (even in a lightbox).

Simply replace the hyperlink to your PDF with the Google Drive shareable URL.

Other sharing services that can view PDFs online would probably work too (e.g., Dropbox), but you may want to factor in how much user interface (UI) and branding of the service itself adds around the document.

Google Drive will keep the UI minimal if you add &embedded=true to the end of the URL.

Original Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15480804/problems-displaying-pdf-in-iframe-on-mobile-safari

A question came in on the in5 Answer Exchange about how to create a progress bar to indicate the reader’s position within the page count.

This technique is popular with online news magazines.

In the following article, I’m going to show you how to create such a progress bar by attaching a single file when exporting your HTML from InDesign.

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