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

[bren87]

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.

[bren87]

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]

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

[bren87]

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.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Use two styles.

Apply a right inside space to the text frame.

[bren87]

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]

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.

[bren87]

JAWS did not read the spaces I used to force "Director" onto a second line so I may just go with that.

This is uncharted territory - an accessible org chart.  I already have like forty styles, and although they are well-labled, I doubt anyone else on my team can do these.  I am trying to limit the complexity of the styles as much as possible so I don't forget what I did each time I have to update this thing.  The shading and connectors for each org chart box are driven by the paragraph style.

It likewise has dozens of object styles to control the shapes of the boxes and keep them consistent, several Character Styles to set specific text apart.

Crystal's is the only one that does this because her name and title are so short.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Hard spaces after her name, then, would seem to be the best one-off solution, but I don't know how that affects accessibility.

But then — and I am one of the fiercest opponents of soft returns around here — I don't see why a soft line break isn't a valid solution for this case.

[bren87]

Breaks/returns, etc. signal the end of a paragraph and chop the tag up into two separate tags which sounds confusing when JAWS reads it.  

I'm cringing that I have super inelegant spaces after her name, but it seems JAWS is reading it just fine.

Usually, "No Break" works perfectly fine as long as you have another word to grab on to.  So if "Director" had something else after it, it would have worked fine.  😞

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Well, then, the solution is obvious: Crystal needs to be promoted to Senior Director.

[bren87]

HAHA!   I love it.  😄 Thanks so much.  I am going to save these ideas for a later date in case this happens again!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I'll just note that this is a good example of a situation where text is expected to behave, and causes problems when it doesn't. Styles and formatting should "fence in" text so that exceptions can be handled.

[Peter Spier]

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