How do you handle Leader Lines in Word?

Question

I'm sure I'm over-thinking, but I was curious if you do anything special with leader lines, say in a Microsoft Word Table of Contents? For example, the line of text may be "A. This is Your Section Title..................24."

NVDA may read back "Link A. This is your section title; Link 19-dot; Link 24." Where "19-dot" is apparently the total of periods in this particular leader line. I feel like this shouldn't be how table of contents line items should be interpreted, but maybe it is?

Another question: I've noticed that sometimes the export to PDF will create a single link for the ToC listing and other times it may break the line up into parts, similar to how you may have tag breaks if you've changed the character style of a word within a paragraph. Screen readers seem to read it the same, either way, so I was curious if this is normal.

Finally, I believe I am hearing some type of numbered Link ID when NVDA reads the table of contents listing. Using the same example above, my screen reader is literally reading, "Link A. This is your section; Link 19-dot; Link (12) 24." Where 12 is a different number ID for each line of the table of contents list.

I kinda feel like I'm missing something obvious here, considering all three questions. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

- noel.

maxwithdax · Answer

Your AT users experience is going to differ depending on AppleVoice, JAWS or NVDA. The current versions of JAWS only read "dot dot dot" before moving on. You can spend the time to artifact the leaders (I have done it before) but it is really not necessary unless you know the audience most likely to review your content will be using NVDA only. NVDA, being the free reader, has less time for programming development so time addressing things like dot leaders is minimal.

Also, realize that someone reading the TOC will likely skip ahead once they figure out the patter with the 19-dot text.

I did put in a feature request for InDesign to allow us to tag the leaders as artifacts on the design end to keep from having to manually artifact them on the pdf end. Artifact dot leaders – Adobe InDesign Feedback

Alternatively you could set the "Actual Text" to read something other than 19-dot, but you are still having to touch each of the items in your TOC. At that point, I would just artifact them if I had to choose.

-Dax

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