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BBi-TM
BBi-TM
Participant
August 30, 2016
Question

Export to interactive PDF yields only <span> tags?

  • August 30, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 2189 views

Why does my indesign file, when exporting a fully tagged and organized structured document yields <span> tags across the entire interactive PDF? Anyone run into this?

I know I can change the tag once in PDF but why is indesign not exporting with the already assigned tags, and mapped styles to the tags that I've set. I recall fixing this one time but all current efforts have been futile. Having to tag for accessibly twice is difficult on documents with pages counts above 30.

Any help would be appreciated it!

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

O
olafdruemmer
Inspiring
November 30, 2017

Why do you care?

<span> tags are non-semantic tags but can be useful in some cases, for example for setting a language, or adding ActualText text replacements and so forth (which can be extremely useful, and difficult to achieve without the <span> tag).

This is not much different from the world of HTML where <span> tags (or <div> tags) are used extensively, mostly for technical and not for semantic reasons.

Neither <span> nor <div> reduce the degree of accessibility. Assistive technology should normally just skip them when presenting content.

Along these lines, nothing in PDF/UA (or as far as I can tell WCAG) disallow or discourage the use of <span> tags.

D
derrickl68715957
Participating Frequently
November 30, 2017

This is a major problem, because I am only seeing Figures, spans and tables, nothing else! I don't see any headings, paragraphs, nothing. Okay the tags panel is correct, but the TURO tool isn't, and I like using it better than slogging through the tags right off. This is not normal behaviour at all, otherwise I have nothing against the span tag at all

O
olafdruemmer
Inspiring
December 1, 2017

Tagged PDF is called Tagged PDF because it relies on tags to represent the semantic structure. Tagged PDF is not based on or determined by TURO (that is, it is not based on or depending on the sequence in which content objects are contained in the PDF syntax). You may have to get used to the Tags panel - it's your friend if you want to get tagged PDF right...

    D
    derrickl68715957
    Participating Frequently
    November 30, 2017

    Did you find any answer to this? I am having the same issue!

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