Article panel vs structural panel

[sarak454151]

what is the difference between the articles panel and the structural panel. Trying to make an accessible PDF using Indesign and have seen tutorials using both panels. Just wondering which one is better to use?

[Barb Binder]

You establish the content order in the Articles panel. This enables you to precisely define which content in your document gets tagged and in what order. You can add content by dragging and dropping frames and objects into the Articles panel and then arranging them in the desired reading order. You can also break the content up into smaller articles without affecting the page layout.

In older versions of InDesign, you could only add alt text for an image through the XML Structure pane. That option is still available, but since CS5, you can also add alt text with Object Export Options (Object > Object Export Options).

This PDF should be helpful:

http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/products/indesign/pdfs/creating-accessible-pdf-documentw-w...

[sarak454151]

Thank you for your reply. Could you please elaborate on how best to handle flowing text frames? For example, I have headers on the top of each page, but the body text flows for the next 50 pages. In the articles panel, I have the header text as first then the body text but that includes the entire document of body text. Did you say there is a way to break this up?

[Barb Binder]

Hi Sara:

Articles provide an easy way to create relationships among various page items. These relationships can be used to define the content to be exported to an accessible PDF and to define the order of the content. This is important for a multi-story publication like a newsletter. Your document just has one 50-page story in threaded frames? In that case, you don't have to worry about the ordering the content—there's only the one story.

Here is an online course on creating accessible PDFs from InDesign that should address these and any additional questions you come up with down the road:

Creating Accessible PDFs (2014)

And a link for a 10-day free trial to watch it:

Online Video Tutorials at lynda.com • lynda.com 

[sarak454151]

Thank you so much, the PDF article that you attached a link for was very helpful! Thanks again!

[Barb Binder]

You are very welcome, Sara.