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Topic: Creating accessible text tables
Conf: (P-PDF) PDF Accessibility, Msg: 132997
From: Marlene
Date: 5/19/2005 10:55 AM

I am working on a series of documents (there are dozens of them) that all must be made 508 compliant.

Each contains a text table that is two columns wide and anywhere from 5 to over 100 rows deep.

I have tried laying out the documents and tables in both QuarkXPress 5 and InDesign 3, and I cannot get the tables to "read" properly after I make the PDFs accessible. I am using Acrobat 6 Pro on PC (XP).

No matter how I format the tables -- manually or using Quark's or InDesign's table features -- the text is not being read in the correct order. (Which would be reading all the text in the first column cell, then the second column cell, then moving down to the next row.)

Any suggestions? Some of these tables are two or three pages long, so I don't know if using alt text is even a viable option. Is there a limit to how much alt text can be used in one description?

If upgrading to Quark 6.5 or InDesign 4 and Acrobat 7 Pro will help deal with the problem, I'd do that in a heartbeat.

TIA.