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David Swisher

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  1. Make Illustrator PDFs more automatically accessible

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    9 comments  ·  Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests » Other...  ·  Admin →
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    David Swisher commented  · 

    I agree that this is an essential need. While InDesign is the natural solution for page layouts and Illustrator is often seen as just a tool for creating drawings that get placed within InDesign (and thus wouldn't need accessibility), the reality is that LOTS of illustrations ranging from infographics to maps to charts to explanatory graphics are best designed in Illustrator natively and NOT in InDesign.

    In both higher education and government, making all documents accessible is a mandate. It's also fundamental to UDL and a general expectation most places, whether or not it's a requirement.

    It requires quite a bit of post-production editing to tag PDFs with accessibility features that Illustrator ought to be able to handle natively. Further, for many projects (especially those mentioned above), it makes zero sense to build a page structure in InDesign just to enable accessibility when 95% or more of the illustration is done in Illustrator. Doing so is essentially a workaround to what really ought to be a core function.

    Likewise, yes, we can add tags in Acrobat to enable accessibility on the post-production side, but if ANYTHING changes in the original and needs to be updated, all of that post-production work in Acrobat has to be re-done on a newly-exported PDF. This makes it an inefficient workaround, not a legitimate solution.

    Illustrator needs this tagging for accessibility functionality natively.

    David Swisher supported this idea  · 

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