URGENT HELP NEEDED: Adobe Indesign

[Akshay35956754njjz]

So we recently worked on a PDF via InDesign. The brief was to make the document accessible (visually impaired people can also access it for eg). However, in the process of making it accessible, it's no longer editable. Now the client has come back with a request stating that it needs to be editable which is something that we are not able to solve for, without losing the accessibility part. 

Is there anyone who can guide us on how to solve for something like this? The PDF is a digital document, and it is a bit complex with each slide having several pieces of information. 

[Jeffrey_Smith]

What part of this document is not editable? It sounds to me as though there are graphics/images that are placed in Indesign that have text, but the text is outlined or rasterized. And these are the elements that your client is stating are not editable.

Can you provide more details about this document?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

PDF isn't really meant to be an editable document format, any more than print on paper is "editable" because you can paste things over the content. The editing feature is a very weak "small fixup" tool, not really document editing as if it's still a live Word or ID doc.

I suggest the problem is in the expectations, not in any flaw of the production.

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

There might be several issues in this post.

1) If a PDF is accessible, the PDF can't be edited at all, whether in Acrobat or any other tool. If any content is edited/changed (correct a typo, change a color, swap a graphic), the entire structure of the PDF is blown out, and the tags lose content in the yellow content containers — The PDF is no longer accessible.

So you can't make edits in the PDF itself, but instead must go back to the original source document (InDesign, Word, PowerPoint, etc.), make the edits there, and re-export a compliant accessible PDF.

2) If the PDF was brought into InDesign (File / Place), it is treated as a graphic and no graphic is editable in an InDesign layout.

Same solution as above: return to the source file in the source authoring program (InDesign, Word, PowerPoint, etc.), make the edits there, and re-export a compliant accessible PDF.

Hope this helps.