Skip to main content
D
Dianne at Allegra
Inspiring
June 2, 2023
Question

I am having issues with 508 Compliance for PDFs created from InDesign in Burmese language.

  • June 2, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 10418 views

Hi, 

I do a lot of work with health industry and a requirement is getting documents remediated for 508 compliance. I'm having lots of issues with files translated to Burmese. I've tried different fonts for unicode compatibility, making sure the InDesign document is set for Burmese and the Adobe world-ready paragraph composer is set. The files match what I get from my translators, but continually get character encoding issues when I do an accessibilty check or we send for 508 remediation. One suggestion was to set the PDF language to the correct language, but Burmese is not an option. I could use any other suggestions, help or solutions.

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Legend
June 3, 2023


Hi @Dianne at Allegra,

Trying to help diagnose what's happening to your fonts in the PDF. Some questions...

 

  1. What software checker is giving the language error? The one built into Acrobat, or a third-party checker? Need its name and release/build number.
  2. Does it identify specific text or font that's failing?
  3. When you exported the PDF from InDesign, did you ensure that the fonts were embedded? That's required for accessible PDFs. You must export to PDF (Interactive) to have the fonts automatically embedded into the pdf.
  4. The PDF you supplied is not tagged. Can you give us a copy of a tagged version, as it comes out of InDesign without any extra changes done in Acrobat? This will help us diagnose what's  happening.
  5. In InDesign, did you set your paragraph style to use Burmese/Myamar?
    In each Paragraph Style used to format Burmese, set the style's language to Burmese.

     
  6. I noticed you have English words within the paragraphs. For those, create a Character Style and set it to English.
  7. After the PDF is generated, set the PDF's primary language in Acrobat Pro. Since Burmese is not one of the preset languages, you'll have to type in the ISO 639 language code for Burmese/Myanmar — "my".  See the ISO code list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes  and also at  https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php 

 

These steps should correctly set the languages in the PDF.

 

Let us know if this works.

 

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |
D
Dianne at AllegraAuthor
Inspiring
June 16, 2023

Hi Bevi, 

Thank you for replying! I'll dig in a bit more and see if any of your suggestions work. I have not been exporting interactive so will definitely try that. Attached is a screen capture from the remediation vendor. I get issues when doing the accessibily checker in Acrobat. I will give it another shot with your helpful suggestions.

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Legend
June 16, 2023

Hi Dianne,

The screen capture shows another problem: discontiguous paragraphs of text are selected (highlighted in magenta). That's signaling that there are more problems than just the language. Maybe corrupted/damaged text content or mis-tagged content. And that can affect the text encoding.

 

What was your source program that originally created the PDF? InDesign?

If so, which version and platform? Need the long build number with dots, not "2023" or "18".

 

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |
Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices