Vote for accessibility!

Many of the major software companies — including Microsoft and Adobe — have developed new forums for feedback from users called UserVoice.com

For years, those of us working in the accessibility field have been minor voices on the software industry forums, even on the beta advisory forums. It's taken forever to get the tools we now have.

We have the opportunity to change that!

Here's how:

1. Once a month, We'll post feedback on one of the forums that requests a bug fix or a new feature that will help us make accessible documents that are fully compliant.
2. Since the software companies rank feature requests by how many votes they get, I'll send out a notice that a feature request has been posted on the specific UserVoice forum for it.
3. All you have to do is click the link to the post and vote. And you can do this anonymously.

There's strength in numbers: and it's that easy to have our collective votes help convince Adobe and Microsoft that accessibility is worth it.

Sign up to receive the vote notices at http://eepurl.com/dNaqw-/

Got an idea you want to put to a vote? Email us at vote4a11y@pubcom.com

InDesign topics

• Fix *&@%! Text-Wrap bug on Anchored objects
• Fix the multiple <Link-OBJR> subtags in hyperlinks.
• Put the complete PDF/UA tag set into the Export Options dialogue in InDesign
• Add PDF tags to Character Styles
• Tagged PDFs placed in InDesign lose their tags and accessibility
• PDFs placed into an InDesign layout must retain their accessibility, not be treated as graphics
• Artifact dot leaders
• Artifact the "Path" elements
• More Artifact the "Path" elements. They're being voiced by screen readers, PathPathPath. The <Artifact> tag isn't in PDF/UA-1 and, therefore, can't be used at this time: it's a vaporTag that technologies recognize yet. Revert to the PDF/UA-1 method of artifacting these elements. <P>PathPathPath and <Artifact>PathPathPath are invalid tag structures.
• Set Artifact in character styles to artifact unnecessary characters when needed
• Grouped items are missing their Alt-text in the PDF
• Apply Role Mapping to tags from InDesign — No More Crazy-Named Tags!
• Unicode Gylphs — Quick Insert and here
• Unicode Gyphs — Insert Special Characters
• Multiple Accessibility Issues #1
• Multiple Accessibility Issues #2
• Preflight for Accessibility in InDesign files
• Accessibility Checker in InDesign
• Expansion text for acronyms and abbreviations
• Preset for exporting tagged PDFs
• Better Accessibility Export for PDFs
• Include Section numbers in list styles
• Remove <Span> tags: updated
• Remove <Span> tags
• Give user the option to NOT artifact items on a Master Page
• Anchor items across spreads and pages
• Numbered headings not as lists
• Bug in Endnotes with hyperlinks
• MathML in InDesign for maths and formulae
• Preview of PDF Tag Tree in InDesign

InDesign Tables

• InDesign PDF Export should add both table scope and spans
• Table with slanted header row (for long column headers)
• Add Alt-Text to tables in InDesign
• Better tables from InDesign

InDesign Forms

• Anchor form fields into table cells
• Forms in InDesign
• Artifacted Layout Tables
• Add form field calculations in InDesign's forms

MS Word topics

• Set default bullet in Word's bullet styles and utility to use a Unicode font (the current default is set to Symbol 183 on the Symbol font, which is not an accessible Unicode font).
• Let user define Word's default bullet character (right now it uses a black circle from the Symbol font, which isn't Unicode).
• Automatically set File Properties to show Document Title when exporting a PDF from Word.
• Automatically apply List Bullet and List Number paragraph styles when the bulleted/numbered list icons in the top control panel are used.
• Bring back Arial Unicode MS font!

Acrobat topics

• Editing a tagged PDF screws up the tags, deletes the tag's content container (yellow banker's box)
• Multi-line hyperlinks need only one OBJR sub-tag
• Two tag errors with PDF Maker 20: Lists and Document
• PDF Maker should add table scope and spans from MS Word
• Autotag a single page or selected content
• Multiple Undo in the Order and Content panels, too.
• Keyboard shortcut for "Find Tag From Selection"
• Make Acrobat's editing tools accessible to those using screen readers.
• PDF Maker needs to convert <L> lists with the bullets in <Lbl> tag (PDFs from MS Word)
• Tag lists with the compound nested tag structure
• Tag tables from the Tags panel
• Improve tagging tools for Tables and Lists
• Make Order panel match the Tag Tree
• Make Liquid Mode work with PDFs from InDesign