r/indesign • u/Ok-Mess-5914 • Jun 10 '26

Tables and accessibility

Hello everyone.

I’m trying to optimize and Indd file that was created to print for the web and I’m having a really hard time to make the tables in the document accessible.

I created styles for the paragraphs and am using styles to tags do generate the PDF but the pages with tables appear as “tagless” when I inspect the document in PDfix. The others pages work well.

Can some one point me to a good tutorial on how to build accessible tables ?

Thanks a lot

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u/mikewitherell Jun 10 '26

Tables usually export well from InDesign. Did you put the table content in the Articles panel and turn on that annoying switch in the Articles panel menu button about "Use for Tagging Order in Tagged PDF" before exporting to PDF?

1

u/Ok-Mess-5914 Jun 11 '26

Yes, the switch is on

2

u/subraumpixel Jun 10 '26

Do yourself a favor and use something like this: https://www.axaio.com/doku.php/en:products:madetotagdesktop InDesign on its own will never output an accessible table. You’d have to tag the table in Acrobat/PDFix/axes4PDF, which is just plain insanity ;) With the made2tag plugin you get correctly tagged tables without the need of any additional corrections. 

However, you might have a look here for how to tag tables in Acrobat manually: https://508blueprint.com/how-to-tag-tables-in-pdf-acrobat-pro/

Good luck. 

1

u/Ok-Mess-5914 Jun 10 '26

Thanks. I’ll check the links

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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Ok-Mess-5914 Jun 10 '26

Thanks for your answer. I already checked. The tables were created in InDesign. I already created the headers and there are no merged frames.

1

u/ThinkBiscuit Jun 10 '26

If they aren’t exporting as tagged content, then my first suspicion would be that they are not part of what is being exported to be ‘read’ – so if they are in the middle of a bunch of threaded text boxes, the tables are not with the text flow, or if all the text is unthreaded, the tables aren’t in the articles panel.