Change the language Alt Text in indd

[Trinity_AR]

Hi! I'm having a problem with the alt text language. I need to change it automatically in indd.
I changed the language in the document, but it didn't work.
Does anyone have a solution?

(I have the possibility to change it manually but there are too many documents)

[Joel Cherney]

I changed the language in the document, but it didn't work.

That's how it's supposed to work. What did you do in InDesign, exactly? Did you make paragraph styles, then select the correct language in those styles in the "Advanced Character Formats" section of the paragraph style? Did you apply those styles to all the text in your document? 

If you already have InDesign documents with properly styled text, it's usually not too hard to change the language in all of your paragraph styles all at once, with a script. When I'm building an English-language source document that I know is going to be translated into a few dozen languages, I often make sure that my paragraph styles are Based On a single source style, so I can change the language once in a single style and have that langauge propogate down to all of the other paragraph styles. 

[Trinity_AR]

I didn't create this file, I just translated it.
Then, I ran the script to change the language to Spanish. So yes, the language was changed in "Advanced Character Formatting."
If I look at the properties document, it's fine in Spanish.
But it doesn't change the language in this situation.

[Joel Cherney]

If I look at the properties document, it's fine in Spanish.

Oh! I bet you mean "document properties" right?  I bet the English syntax is backwards when compared to every other European language. This value?

So, that value can be changed at PDF export from InDesign:

If you need to specify a language not in the dropdown, I think you use the ISO 639-2 three-letter code, although I recall that this has changed somewhere in recent releases of InDesign, so I'd want to double-check that with official sources before saying that conclusively. Speaking of official sources, Adobe's offical stance seems to be to set that field in Acrobat, not in InDesign. I've been doing it from the Advanced section of the PDF Export dialog for a few years, so I don't know if that linked document is current, or if maybe I'm doing it incorrectly?

[Trinity_AR]

I did all that. But the result is different. I don't think there's a solution right now. Or, well, the solution is to change it manually.

[Joel Cherney]

I find that very odd! But I am at the end of a long project that I was finishing in InDesign 2024 and haven't done much accessibility in 2025 yet. I was working on a demo for you, with some GIFs to show how it was supposed to work. I specified Arabic in my dropdown at export in InDesign 2025 - and it showed up in Acrobat marked as Chinese.  So I suspect that there may be a bug present here in 2025 that wasn't in 2024.

[Trinity_AR]

Thank you so much! I think than this is the problem, indd 2025.