Turn your InDesign resume into an accessible PDF

Photo by Daniel Ali on Unsplash

If you’re a designer, you might reach for Adobe InDesign to create a PDF version of your resume. You’ll have creative control over your document layout that you just can’t get in Word.

If you’re a designer who creates websites, you should be familiar with web accessibility. W3C explains web accessibility as websites, tools, and technologies designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them.

But did you know that PDFs should be accessible, too? When I learned this, I was sad that I didn’t know sooner. I’d been distributing PDFs that were potentially unusable for people who need assistive technologies to read them.

Accessible PDFs don’t just magically happen when you export to PDF. It’s okay if accessible PDFs are something that you don’t know about yet. Today is a great day to start making your PDFs accessible. Why not start with your resume?

InDesign + Acrobat

InDesign is really good at creating accessible PDFs, but it doesn’t happen automatically. You need to build your document in a specific way to export a PDF that requires minimal remediation. Remediation is the process of fixing accessibility errors in your documents.

Creating an accessible document with InDesign is a two-step process. First, you create your InDesign file and export it as PDF. Then you open Acrobat, perform an accessibility check, and remediate anything that needs to be fixed.

In a LinkedIn post, Dax Castro shares a video where he performs accessibility remediation on an InDesign PDF. The process he goes through is not fun. The good news is that it’s not needed if you build your InDesign file the right way.

In this article, we’ll focus specifically on how to create your InDesign file so that it will require minimal remediation in Acrobat.

Setting up your InDesign file for success

So how do you create an InDesign file that needs minimal remediation in Acrobat? There are four critical elements:

1. Color contrast
2. Tagged headers and content
3. Layer order
4. Objects with alt text or as artifacts

We’ll look at how to set up your resume using a sample that I created based on a generic resume from resume.com.

Our sample resume contains headings, subheadings, paragraphs, lists, and images.

Our example will use a one-column layout. In 5 ways to make a CV more Accessible, the author points out that one column works better for some assistive technology users:

Providing your resume in a column format makes it a lot more difficult to read. Your audience may require the use of a reading pen or screen reader to scan the page for text. It can be very difficult to depict when a column ends and starts. This will make your CV confusing and difficult to follow. We recommend using a single body or left-aligned text with correct headings.

Element 1: Color contrast

Your text should have enough contrast between the text color and its background that your reader can easily consume your content.

WebAIM has an explainer on color contrast standards that you can dig into if color contrast standards are new to you. You want your resume to meet at least WCAG Level AA, which means that the color contrast ratio of your foreground text to background color is at least 4.5:1. While WCAG doesn’t explicitly apply to PDFs, it’s a good guideline to follow to help all of your readers. Use black or dark gray for content, not light gray. Don’t use a light color for subheads, even if you think it looks pretty. Choose a darker shade that’s easier to read.

Use tools like WebAIM’s color contrast checker or whocanuse.com to calculate your foreground-to-background ratios to make sure that your text color combinations meet accessibility standards.

Element 2: Tagged headers and content

When you look at a resume, you might scan it to look for sections about work experience, skills, or education. People who cannot visually scan a resume will use assistive technology like screen readers to accomplish the same thing. Screen readers rely on tagged content to help people navigate documents.

Tags define the content structure. Headers are tagged in cascading order using H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, or H6. Content can be tagged as paragraphs (P) or list items (LI). All text in your resume needs the right tag to be read correctly by assistive technology.

Create an outline
It can be helpful to create an outline of your resume, and include semantic tagging for your structure. Here’s the outline for our sample resume:

A text outline of a resume defines sections and allows us to explore proper header nesting.

In our outline, we properly nest our headers. Your name is your resume title, and it’s the H1. Main section headers that follow the title are H2s. The experience section is broken down into additional headings with each job, and those are H3s.

Proper nesting is critical for screen readers to navigate a document. H3s are always nested under H2s, and H2s are nested under H1s. H3 will never directly follow H1 — it can only follow H2. Never skip levels when nesting headers.

Apply semantic tags in InDesign
InDesign doesn’t magically apply the right tags to your content. You have to tell it what content gets which tag. You do this with paragraph style sheets. All text must have a paragraph style applied, and all paragraph styles must have a tag defined.

1. Create a paragraph style sheet for every text style in your document. If you’re not familiar with using style sheets, there are plenty of online resources you can use to learn.
2. Include the tag in your style name. This isn’t required to tag your document, but it’s useful to manage your styles and tags.
3. Assign the export tag for each style. You do this with Paragraph Style Options.

In the image below, you can see the style sheets pane for our sample resume. It shows heading, paragraph, and bullet list styles.

Our sample resume is marked up to show what text will be assigned which tag, and style sheets have been created for each heading, paragraph, and list style.

You must manually assign PDF tags for most styles. Double-click a style in the Paragraph Styles pane to open the Paragraph Style Options window. In the window’s left sidebar, find and click “Export tagging” at the bottom. Look for the “PDF” section, and select the tag that corresponds to your paragraph style.

Use the Export Tagging section of the style sheet editor to assign tags for a style sheet.

• For headings, choose the corresponding header level.
• For paragraphs, choose “P”.
• For bullet points, use InDesign’s “Bulleted & Numbered Lists” type tool to create bullet points. Then choose “[Automatic]” for your export tag. InDesign will properly tag your bullets as list items.

Element 3: Layer order

When you read a page, you start at the top and move down the page with your eyes. To replicate this for assistive technologies that read your page, you must set the reading order for the elements on your page. In InDesign, you do this with layers.

When you export your InDesign file to PDF, a reading order will be built into your PDF. There’s one key thing to remember: the bottom layer in your InDesign file is first in the reading order, and the top layer is last.

We want a screen reader to read our resume in the following order:

1. Name
2. Location
3. Phone
4. Email
5. Summary
6. Experience
7. and so on…

To make that happen, we must arrange our layers in the reverse order of that list. Name should be below Location, Location should be below Phone, and so on. The image below shows the correct order of our layers, so that screen readers read the top of the page first, and move down the page.

Set your PDF reading order in InDesign by arranging the order of your layers.

Element 4: Objects with alt text or as artifacts

If your resume contains images or shapes like lines or circles, you need to determine if people who use screen readers need to know about them, since they may not be able to visually see them. Then you need to tell InDesign about it. Just like all text in your document needs to be tagged, so do your objects. Mark them as decorative artifacts, or include alt text for them.

Our sample resume contains the following objects that aren’t text:

• Circles in the background
• An image of a penguin
• A horizontal line in the header
• Icons labeling location, phone, and email

The circles, penguin image, and line are purely decorative. These can and should be ignored by screen readers. You will tag them as artifacts in InDesign:

1. Select the image or shape.
2. Go to “Object” in the menu bar, or right-click on your image or shape, and select “Object Export Options…”
3. In the window, select the “Tagged PDF” tab.
4. Apply the “Artifact” tag.

Apply the “Artifact” tag to any objects like images or shapes that screen readers should ignore.

Three images in the resume, however, do have meaning. The icons for location, phone, and email are visual labels for the content that follows them. We don’t want a screen reader to ignore these. We want to describe them to people who can’t see them on the page. We’ll add alt text to those images. To add alt text in InDesign:

1. Select the image or shape.
2. Go to “Object” in the menu bar, or right-click on your object, and select “Object Export Options…”
3. In the window, select the “Alt Text” tab.
4. Enter a description of your image or shape.

Write descriptive alt text for any images or objects that contain important information.

Deque’s How to Design Great Alt Text: An Introduction includes tips to help you determine if your object should include alt text or be tagged as an artifact.

Bonus element: Document title

You can add a document title in Acrobat, but it’s just as easy to do it in InDesign. The document title appears at the top of the window in some applications.

1. In the “File” menu, go to “File Info”.
2. Make sure that “Basic” is selected in the left sidebar. The first field you see in the window is “Document Title.”
3. Add a document title and any other metadata you want to include. For our sample resume, “Julianna Penguin Resume” is a decent title.

Exporting your file to PDF

Once you’ve confirmed that your color contrast is good, your style sheets are tagged, your layers are correctly ordered, and your objects have alt text or artifact tagging, you’re ready to export a PDF that will need very little accessibility remediation in Acrobat.

1. In the “File” menu, go to “Export” and choose “Adobe PDF (Print)” in the “Format” dropdown.
2. Click “Save.” This will open a window with PDF options.
3. Under “Options”, check “Export Tagged PDF”.
4. Under “Include”, check “Bookmarks” and “Hyperlinks”. Quick note about bookmarks: I haven’t included information on adding bookmarks in InDesign because for a simple document like a resume, it’s probably easier to add them in Acrobat. I won’t dig into that in this article, but look for a future post on Acrobat Bookmarks.
5. Click “Export” to create your PDF.

Now you can open your PDF in Acrobat.

Remediating in Acrobat

When you open your file in Acrobat, you’ll need Acrobat’s Accessibility tool to continue. If you haven’t used the tool before, go to the “Tools” tab, search for Accessibility, and add the tool. It should appear in your right sidebar. Click the tool name to open it.

The accessibility tool should appear with your other tools in your sidebar.

When you open the Accessibility tool, run the Accessibility Checker on your document. If you’ve followed along on all the InDesign steps, the results returned from the check will show minimal accessibility errors in your document. It will check your header nesting, your alt text, your content tagging, your document title, your reading order, and more.

If those elements are showing errors in the Acrobat accessibility check, return to InDesign to make corrections. While it’s technically possible to correct many items in Acrobat, it’s easier and less frustrating to make the changes in the InDesign source file. Plus, if you need to make future edits to your document, the errors are already corrected in InDesign and you won’t have to deal with them again in Acrobat.

As I noted earlier, I won’t focus here on additional Acrobat remediation. That’s a subject for a future article—well, several future articles, if we’re being honest. PDF accessibility can be a complicated process, but setting up your document in InDesign properly from the start gets you nearly to the finish line. Once you learn how to set your resume up for accessibility in InDesign, you’re on your way to making all of your InDesign files accessible for all audiences.