Accessibility Warning: "TOCI" elements are correctly linked to headings

Question

A little context for our situation. We create our documents in InDesign, export to PDF, remediate and deliver. We recently moved from PAC 2021 to the new PAC 2024 (which is great BTW) as our accessibility checker which has a new "Quality" tab. The things shown on the quality tab are not UA or WCAG errors but, rather, are things that improve the experience for the users.

On our Tables of Contents (which we've done the same way for ever using the automated TOC tools in InDesign) we are getting a PAC 2024 quality error that reads "TOCI element links to an incorrect destination". I messaged axes about the error because I was a bit confused by it and was told that the TOCI links need to direct the user to the Heading Level (H2, H3, H4, etc) but in our documents it's pointing to the page. This is a warning because if the user has low vision uses the zoom feature on the document to something like 300% they will select the TOCI and go to the top of their destination page instead of the heading which might be half way down the page. So they will be lost and have to figure out where the heading level is they are looking for.

What I can't figure out is how to link directly to a Heading Level. In the Add/Edit links options I only see Go to a Page.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Frans v.d. Geest · Accepted Answer

Well some more insight on this: lets say you have three (sub)headings on the same page, then each TOCi link would bring you to the same page and to the top if the page instead of going to the place where the (sub)heading starts.

So you will need to create Text anchors for each heading. AxesPDF can create this for you but you will still have to edit each TOCi link in the PDF to set it to that Text anchors.

If you use InDesign, you are in luck as Peter Kahrel wrote a script that does all that in one click in the InDesign source document.

https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/accessible-toc.html

That said, this is about 'best practices' for now so you could also simply ignore it 😉

gloam_6997 · Answer

I used the script provided by Peter Kahrel for TOCS in InDesign and they did work. But if you are already at the stage where you'd rather just fix the error in Acrobat Pro - there is a way. You need to delete the links created automatically by InDesign, and then make the links again using Acrobat's Add/Edit Web or Document Link tool. Choose Link Action - Go to a page view - Set Link. Scroll to the page where you want the link to appear and make sure you scroll so that the header that corresponds to where you want the link to take you is at the top.  So if the TOC entry is for example: Definitions....8, make sure you scroll to page 8 and to the part where the header for Definition is. Then set link. You'll see that the warnings no longer appear. You will need to do the usual fixes with adding "Link - OBJR" and adding alts for links, but that's easy to do.

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