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I wish InDesign was taught better in school probably be looking into some InDesign courses more in depth since I've figured out how these errors are happening. 🙂
By @Bec W.
This has been an industry problem for decades. "Those who decide the college curriculum" usually don't have much professional experience in the real world (said as a former adjuct faculty in a graphic design/digital media cirruculum at a major university, and as a former magazine art director). Their reasoning for not teaching these technicalities is that they don't want to impair the students' creativity, and that students will learn these things once on the job.
The problem is that graduates end up in your situation: something's not right and you can't figure out what it is and your job is on the line.
Most design students have a hard time getting jobs right out of school because they don't know the difference between CMYK and RGB, or they don't know how to make an accessible brochure, or they don't know how to make a basic website that's accessible.
Art = create whatever you want, who cares if it's accessible.
Design = Art + Engineering to craft a solution that fulfills the need for accessible, gorgeous, effective communication to everyone.
I can't comment about other training, but we specifically design our master classes to meet the needs of professionals who didn't get everything they need during their original training. We teach what we do — the methods covered are the ones we use in our studio to create our clients' projects, and they export from InDesign nearly perfectly and need only minor tweaks in Acrobat to meet accessibility requirements. Rarely do we get the errors you described. I'm taking a break right now from a 80-page annual report...90%+ accessible right out of InDesign.
I hope you'll consider one of our master classes, I'd love to have you in it. When you're ready, contact me offlist from our website, mention this thread, and I'll see what discount I can give you (and that offer is for anyone else who reads this thread).
You can bet that I won't retire rich doing something like that! But I'm in this field for a personal reason; accessibility affects my family, friends, and colleagues.
I want to change the way we graphic designers design and ensure that everything we create is available to everyone, regardless of whether they have a disability or use this technology versus another. It is possible to have creative, great graphic design and be accessible, too. It's all about the engineering!
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