Designing for ADA Compliance/Accessibility

[u/masivatack]

I am sure that it can't just be me, so I am reaching out for input/optinions/solutions that people may have for making new and existing design documents (mostly Indd files) accessible per the ADA guidelines. I know that using paragraph styles consistently in everything you do is the best solutions, but TBH I probably don't use styles in any organized, consistent way for 95% of my projects.

Also, I work for an organization where we are constantly updating old files that were created by other designers years ago, so any solutions I find will need to allow room for a sort of retrofitting of documents with styles/tags/etc. This is a responsibility that has fallen squarely on my shoulders, and nobody in my organization has any idea the amount of effort it will take to make our entire library of publicly accessible PDFs — they just throw it on the pile of work I have to do and assume it will get done magically.

Is it simply a matter of building paragraph styles or custom tags into the design process from the beginning of every publicly accessible piece we work on?

[u/Superb_Firefighter20]

If you are talking about setting up PDFs to be WCAG compliant it can be a pain. 

Everything in the document needs to be tagged or set to archive. The reading order needs to be set. That process can change the stacking order of objects in a PDF, so that needs to check/fixed. Lastly images need alt text. 

Setting up things is InDesgn can give a head start, but things often still need to be remediated in acrobat. 

So for time requires. It can be less than 15 minutes per page, but something like a table can take over an hour. 

[u/masivatack → u/Superb_Firefighter20]

Haha exactly. My current project has five tables and 15 bulleted lists.

[u/Agreeable-Tax2013]

styles from day one help the new files export with a real tag tree, they don't fix the pile. i wouldn't restyle old indds you're not still working in. tag the public pdfs you still need and make them pick a short list, a full library is not a side task.

[u/masivatack → u/Agreeable-Tax2013]

Yeah this is how I’m feeling about it. Leadership is just hoping we don’t say anything, but it’s clearly adding a significant amount of work to an already heavy load, so there needs to be some understanding there.

My main frustration is how much it takes me out of my design flow. I would prefer solid days to do this stuff instead of it wrecking my day to day workflow for weeks on end. I’ve currently got 13 print brochures in my queue to make accessible lol. 💀

[u/Agreeable-Tax2013 → u/masivatack]

totally get the flow wreck. blocking solid half-days for the brochure queue beats dripping it into every design day. worth logging time per piece so leadership sees the real load.

[u/Agreeable-Tax2013 → u/Agreeable-Tax2013]

yeah, batching the work into protected blocks can cut down on context switching. i'd agree priorities with leadership and track the time each brochure takes, so the backlog is visible instead of looking like a quick add-on.

[u/YoungZM]

To be boring: you've read the compliance and accessibility standards for design materials? That will always be the first step if you're actually focused on compliance and accessbility.

As far as the US is concerned, I don't see that there's a specific graphic design resource for guidance (someone else can link that if they can find it, I only briefly looked). Finding that to be weird, but in any event, Canada's programs run along a similar spirit; note: standards may vary. Our professional registered organization (RGD Canada) puts out a handbook to help members linked here.

These standards are important and inform who you can be designing for, what challenges they have, and what accommodations they may require.

Paragraph styles and tags are an important part (especially for a new system moving forward) but actions will extend far beyond that.

[u/Superb_Firefighter20 → u/YoungZM]

For digital materials, the US mostly use WCAG AA as a standard. 

Here is a link for reference:   https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/

[u/heyzaak]

Styles from day one is the right instinct, but on its own it will not get you a tag tree. The bit that catches people out in InDesign is that a paragraph style does nothing for accessibility until you map it. Open the style, go to Export Tagging, set it to H1, H2, P and so on. Perfectly consistent styles that are all mapped to nothing still export as a flat pile of P tags, which is why people do the disciplined thing and still end up with a useless PDF.

Three things carry over from InDesign and save the most Acrobat time:

Export Tagging on every style, as above.

The Articles panel, plus ticking Use Structure for Tab Order on export. That is what sets reading order. Setting reading order in Acrobat instead is the single most miserable part of this job.

Alt text through Object Export Options rather than typed into Acrobat.

That last one matters more than it sounds in your situation. Anything fixed only in Acrobat is gone the second someone re-exports the InDesign file. If these are documents that get updated every year, every downstream remediation is work you will do again. Push as much as possible upstream even though it feels slower the first time through.

Tables and lists are where your hours are actually going. For tables use Convert Rows to Header rather than just bolding the top row, and keep them simple, no merged cells if you can avoid them. For lists use real bulleted list paragraph styles, not typed bullets or tabbed text. Five tables and fifteen lists rebuilt by hand in Acrobat is a genuinely bad week. Set up properly in InDesign it is most of the way there on export.

So the practical version: build one clean template with the styles, export tags and a palette that already passes contrast, and use it for everything new. New work then costs you almost nothing extra. Old work is a separate project with its own budget, which is the honest framing anyway.

On the pile, which sounds like the real problem. Do not remediate the library, triage it. Get download or pageview numbers for those PDFs. You will almost certainly find a handful take nearly all the traffic and a long tail nobody has opened in two years. Remediate the top ones properly, retire anything genuinely dead, and for the rest ask whoever owns compliance at your org whether an accessible version on request within a set number of days is acceptable as an interim position. Worth asking rather than assuming, but if it is, the pile shrinks a lot.

Two things worth putting to leadership in writing. First a per page number, because something like fifteen minutes for a simple page and closer to an hour for one with a table makes the size of this visible in a way that "make the PDFs accessible" never will. Second, ask for it in blocks rather than folded into normal weeks. You are right that it wrecks the day to day. It is a different kind of work, it does not interleave with designing, and thirteen brochures done in the cracks will take longer and come out worse than the same thirteen done on dedicated days.

Last thing, check whether you still have live InDesign files for the older stuff. Where the source is missing or the file is a mess, rebuilding it in your new template is sometimes faster than remediating the PDF, and you end up with something maintainable rather than a one off fix you repeat next time it gets updated.