Accessibility - Adding a pause in voice over playback

[johnf35366569]

Is there a way to add a voice pause when going from a bullet point to a heading. The screen reader/voice over playback in the exported pdf from Indesign wont pause betwen the two text boxes. It just reads on as the same sentence which is confusing for playback. Not sure if it occurs in other screen readers.

In Indesign I added tags to my paragraph styles. Set up articles in correct order. It all reads in the correct order.

The read back in the pdf has pauses after the page heading to the bullet points and between each of the bullet points correctly. But going from a bullet point to another heading in a seperate text box it reads on. Any suggestions to add the pause in Indesign. I've tried adding a return, differnet space characters, even another bullet point thats invisible. It still reads on. 

Any suggestions as I have a few clients asking for better accessibilty for the ision impaired.

Thanks

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

Most voicing isues have nothing to do with InDesign. Instead, they're controlled by the various brands of screen readers (text-to-speech software) and the verbosity settings chosen by the end user.

But here's a best practice task that might help:

When creating accessible lists, end each bullet item <LI> with a period, comma, or other punctuation. Screen readers will pause and/or drop the voicing when they encounter punctuation. It's part of the phrasing that is built into screen reading software.

[johnf35366569]

Thanks. I will give it a go

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

@johnf35366569  Thinking...

Most standards-compliant screen readers announce lists in this manner (or something close):

List, 3 items.

Bullet, blah blah.

Bullet, blah blah blah.

Bullet, blady blah blah.

Out of list.

(and it continues on to the regular text)

So the listener always knows, first, that they are about to enter a list; second, how many items are in the list; and third, when the list is completed.

There's absolutely no run-in with the regular text that follows the list. The difference in the content is very clear.

Which makes me wonder which screen reader your client is using to test the accessibility? If it's not a fully-featured SR, it could be mis-voicing the list. This is very common with the POCC (piece of "crud" code) Read Out Loud built into Adobe Acrobat. It's ancient, built long before we even had accessibility standards for PDFs and does a poor job of voicing PDF content correctly.

It has so many errors, no one recommends it for testing accessibility.

In order to test, look at these options that are reviewed in one of our blogs: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/2019_04-05/checking-with-screenreaders.shtml  and take some of the free online training that's available, too.

Hope this helps.

[johnf35366569]

Thanks Bevi. I have fixed my file for 'Read out Loud' in Acrobat and have forwarded your reply and blog link to the client which is a broadcasting service.

Thanks