For
PDF accessibility for design and digital agencies
Accessibility arrived in your client contracts. What to build into the studio workflow so it stops being a line item you lose money on.
Build it into the studio, not into the quote
The agencies that lose money on accessibility are the ones treating it as a remediation step at the end. The ones that do not have moved it into how documents are built.
Paragraph and character styles mapped to tags. InDesign’s Export Tagged PDF settings on each style, done once per template.
The Articles panel for reading order. This is the single highest-value habit. Drag frames into the Articles panel in reading order, tick Use for Tagging Order, and the export has a correct structure tree. Doing it in InDesign takes two minutes; fixing it in the PDF takes forty.
Alt text in the layout. Object → Object Export Options → Alt Text. It travels with the placed image and survives relinking.
Real tables with real header rows. Table → Convert Rows → To Header.
A document title and language in File Info and the paragraph style language.
None of that is extra work once it is habit. All of it is expensive if left to the end.
What the studio cannot fix
Two things, worth knowing before you quote.
Client-supplied PDFs. Anything you did not produce arrives in whatever state it arrives in. Validate before quoting — a client’s “just make these accessible too” can be an hour or a week, and the free validator tells you which in about a second per file.
Right-to-left storage order. If you produce Hebrew or Arabic work, older client material may store text pre-reversed. InDesign will not tell you, and the page looks perfect. What the failure is →
What to tell the client
Be precise, because this is where agencies create liability for themselves.
You produce documents that meet a defined technical standard — PDF/UA-1, WCAG 2.1 Level AA, whichever the contract names. You provide a report showing what was checked and what was found. Legal compliance is a determination their counsel makes on the basis of their own obligations.
Taggart’s remediation report is written to be handed over in exactly that way, and every copy carries the sentence that it is not a legal determination.
Frequently asked questions
Should we quote accessibility separately?
Quote it separately the first time, then build it into the base rate once the studio workflow makes it cheap. Agencies that absorb it before fixing their process lose money; agencies that keep it as a permanent line item invite the client to remove it.
Can InDesign produce a compliant PDF on its own?
It gets you most of the way if the document is built properly: paragraph styles mapped to tags, the Articles panel used to set reading order, alt text on placed images, real table headers. What it will not reliably do is table header scope on complex tables, and it cannot do anything about right-to-left storage order.
What do we tell clients about compliance?
That you have produced a document meeting a defined technical standard, and that legal compliance is a determination their counsel makes. Any agency asserting compliance on a client's behalf is accepting a liability it is not insured for.
Check your own file. Taggart's validator is free and unlimited — no page cap, no watermark, no account.
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