Accessibility - What to Do When "No Break" doesn't help?

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
April 23, 2024
3 replies
1495 views

What do you do when you need to force a short word onto a second line, and there's not another word to pair it with so the No Break Character Style works?

For example, I need "Crystal Garner" on the first line, and "Director" on the second line. I cannot resize the box.

No Break doesn't help here. If I put a hard or soft return, it chops the tags into two separate tags and I have to remediate.

If I use a spacebar after "Garner" to force "Director" onto the second line, I think the extra spaces make for a horrible listening experience and I'd need to artifact those spaces.

I am looking for ways to do this in InDesign without having to remediate the PDF. I think something obvious has failed to occur to me here - let me know what ideas you have? Thanks in advance.

How to

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Peter Spier

Community Expert

rather than adding spaces, perhaps type a tab after director and apply No Break to the word and tab?

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Use two styles.

Apply a right inside space to the text frame.

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bren87Author

Inspiring

Could you do that with a Character Style? I already have that set up. I don't want two Paragraph Styles if at all possiblele.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

I don't know anything about the scope of your doc and styles, even for this element, so I can't say what the best solution would be. I'd look at:

Using two styles to give maximum control across the full range of elements.
Use a right inside space on the text frame, with an Object Style to make it global/controllable.
Put a hard space between the names and set the Paragraph Style's right margin so that it makes these strings break at the right point for all of them.
And this may be (one of the very rare) places to use a soft return as well, although I am not sure how that affects accessibility/read-out-loud.

It all depends on that scope and complexity of the doc and this element... but never be afraid to use more styles, epecially in a hierarchy, to get exactly the control you need in ID. It's false economy or something like it to arbitrarily try to limit styles.

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bren87Author

Inspiring

It looks like when I use spaces after "Garner" to force "Director" onto the second line, it puts "Director" inside a <span> tag. Just want to make sure that's okay?

#accessibility

Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

Have you tried using Acrobat's Autotag function to clean up the tags? It's pretty good at reorganizing things.

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bren87Author

Inspiring

We can't use that because AutoTag doesn't make PDF/UA-compliant documents. It does a good job on PDFs where no accessibility has been done at all, but you still have to remediate.

These charts are 95% accessible right out of InDesign. I had to fix some figure tags where I have added alt-texts to explain the org chart hierarchy and set some actual text for abbreviations, do preflight fixups, and I was good.

I ran the document through JAWS and it did not voice any of the extra spaces I whacked in after "Crystal Gardner" to force "Director" onto another line. So while it's an inelegant solution, it seems to read just fine. JAWS didn't trip over it at all.

Generally, we avoid hard/soft returns because those signal the end of a paragraph and it chops the tags into two separate paragraphs which is confusing.

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