Answered

How can I avoid fragmented paragraphs when exporting a tagged, accessible PDF?

Forum|Forum|4 months ago
January 6, 2026
2 replies
204 views

I’m trying to create an accessible PDF. The screen reader (voiceover on Mac) pauses after each line. Apparently this is caused by the document’s structure. The paragraph element contains separate tags for each line. How can I avoid this?

This is what the tag structure looks like in Acrobat:
Bildschirmfoto 2026-01-06 um 15.47.56.png

Correct answer Frans v.d. Geest

Perfectly fine structure, use a real screen reader (NVDA or Jaws on PC or indeed VO on Mac) in combination with that reader program key+Arrow down on NVDA/Jaws, and with VO Control+Option+A (!) not the cursor arrow down because that is 'line for line' mode in many screen readers. But the tag is 100% fine in your screenshot

Frans v.d. Geest

Correct answer

Community Expert

Perfectly fine structure, use a real screen reader (NVDA or Jaws on PC or indeed VO on Mac) in combination with that reader program key+Arrow down on NVDA/Jaws, and with VO Control+Option+A (!) not the cursor arrow down because that is 'line for line' mode in many screen readers. But the tag is 100% fine in your screenshot

J

JV84Author

That's exactly what I’m doing. control+option+A in Voice Over. It inserts a small pause at the end of each line. But if the structure is good, I guess that’s just a bug in VO.

creative explorer

Community Expert

@JV84 Because you are creating this in InDesign, how are you creating your PDF?

Save as PDF
Print as PDF
Export as PDF

I would use the last one, Export as PDF (Interactive)

If you already have the PDFs created, you could manually merge the tags into one line. Then delete the empty <p> tags or any other stray container

m

J

JV84Author

@creative explorer I do use Export as PDF (Interactive).

In the meantime, I also tried exporting as a print pdf with tags and changing the paragraph settings from Adobe Paragraph Composer to Adobe Single-Line Composer, but no luck.

Manually merging them in every document I generate would take a lot of time. Ideally I would be able to export them merged.

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

I think highly of Frans v.d. Geeste's answer here: https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/location-of-the-table-of-contents-in-epub/m-p/13387373

The composer settings ought not have any bearing on this. (The "single line" versus "paragraph" names for the Composers refers to whether or not the composer looks only at the current line when deciding how much type could fit. or if it looks at the whole paragraph with the freedom to make composition changes in the lines above.)

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