Span tags everywhere, and style tags in tables

[trista_c]

Hopefully I haven't missed this in another thread, but I've been remediating an InDesign doc all morning and thought I would ask about the span tags. My InDesign document has inserted them unnecessarily EVERYWHERE. I've so far not been able to figure out why InDesign does this. I always take them out for a cleaner accessible document, but is it very bad practice to leave them in?

I just read somewhere that this happens when you manually override a style. Does anyone know if this is true? If so this is bad news for me with the type of document I'm working on as I have to tweak things on each page to make the content work in different situations and creating millions of different Paragraph styles would be a pain.

Similar question with paragraph style tags being included in table headers and cells. So the <TH> tag includes the <Paragraph_Style> tag which then includes the content of the cell. I've been told it's not necessary and usually try to clean them out but again can't figure out how to avoid it.

Any guidance is appreciated. I'm using CC 2015.

Thanks!

[pixelstrolch]

You definitly get a cleaner markup if you use paragraph and character styles more strictly. That means you should have as less paragraph overrides as possible.

However, assistive technology ignores the span tag as far as I know. I guess the reason is that this generic tag is used for different cases, for example underlined or superscript text. <Span> does not have a clear semantic meaning.

I don't see an issue with <Paragraph_Style> tags used inside the <TD> tag.

[Meenakshi Negi]

Moving this thread to InDesign

[Steve Werner]

Here is another thread which may provide information:

PDF is all spans from InDesign

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com · Accepted solution]

Sigh.

This is going to be a long answer, but I hope it helps you make accessible PDFs from InDesign.

1. Upgrade to the latest versions of InDesign and Acrobat Pro. CC:2015 is quite out of date, and it's partly to blame for the mis-tagging you're getting in the PDF.

2. Yes, manual formatting (aka, overrides) causes <SPAN> tags in the PDF. The span tag is intended to identify that the text has been formatted differently...won't state the reason why. At this time, screen readers skip over span tags, but that won't be the case in the future.

3. Accessibility is not just for those who use screen readers: it's for people with sight, hearing, mobility, neurlogic, and cognitive disabilities. When you manually format text, you prevent many assistive technologies from adjusting it to what the user needs. Example: someone with dyslexia uses software that replaces the fonts in the PDF with dyslexie fonts which improves his ability to read the PDF. Or someone with low vision uses ZoomText which enlarges the text to 6-12" tall. Think of manual formatting as permanently hardwiring that font, size, color, etc. into the content and all of these assistive technologies can't override it.

Styles styles and styles. Make character styles when you can for bold, italics, underlining, or any other place where you would manually format text within a paragraph.

Create variations of your paragraph styles for what you need to do, such as  adding more space above a paragraph or increasing/decreasing the indent.

4. Adobe is working toward the new PDF 2.0 and forthcoming PDF/UA-2 standards, so you're starting to see more tags in tables than before. Let them be. It's a bit clunky right now  but that will be adjusted soon.

5. And in the thread Steve above referenced, that's a different problem. There's an error in the conversion from InDesign to PDF for the past 1.5 years where, if you view the PDF in the ORDER panel (not the tags panel), it shows every frigging line is wrapped in a <SPAN> tag. Doesn't appear in the TAG tree panel, which is what most assistive technologies are programmed to use. So ignore them for now as they don't appear to affect assistive technologies. Hopefully Adobe will correct this royal PITA soon.

—Bevi Chagnon

Member of the ISO committees for PDF and PDF/UA

[trista_c]

Thanks so much again for the information, Bevi. This is very helpful. It's good to have it confirmed that the span tags are not read (I should get better at testing with different screen readers), but interesting that it may change in the future. I'm also glad you pointed out that assistive devices can't modify text with overrides - I don't always think of that when I'm creating my documents.

Unfortunately this means I just can't use InDesign the way I wanted to. I was looking for a better solution to everything being in a PowerPoint presentation (I work in government and PowerPoints are used to build all kinds of briefing documents). A lot of the content gets built out quickly and the content varies so much from page to page that I would have to create endless new styles and it would not be practical at all.