New Accessibility Features in InDesign 2025
If you use InDesign to create EPUBs, check your Creative Cloud app and update to InDesign 20.0, which has just been released. As a result of work by the InDesign expert group — made up of Richard Orme (DAISY), Jonas Lillqvist (Accessibility Library Celia), Gregorio Pellegrino (Fondazione LIA), and Laura Brady (eBOUND) — there have been a few improvements to the EPUB export in the past year. See this Inclusive Publishing post, and the Fondazione LIA blog for news.
Pagination Source
There is now a place in the EPUB Export Options dialog box to augment how InDesign generates a pagelist.
Ebook developers have been able to create a pagelist for a few months now, but this latest release also has a space to name a source for the pagelist. Being able to point to a print ISBN is an important piece of the accessibility puzzle as it gives important context for the pagelist, allowing readers to understand the source of the pagination. So in a classroom where some students are using ebooks and others are using print books, everyone can be looking at the same page.
Note: InDesign exports the source ISBN as: <meta property="pageBreakSource">urn:isbn:9781000000000</meta>. Ace by DAISY will report this as an error at present because it is looking for the older way of marking the source ISBN — that is, <dc:source id="pg-src">9781000000000</dc:source> — but Ace will be updated very soon.
MathML
Also new to this version of InDesign — and frankly a long overdue development — is the ability to create and export MathML expressions. This will be of interest to a broad swath of ebook developers and textbook publishers. While this is an early iteration of MathML, and the integration has some known limitations, this is a very positive step.
At present MathML is exported as SVG vector images with MathML added after the image and hidden. A serious issue for print projects is the fact that math equations will be in RGB black, which separates into rich black by default when converted to CMYK, resulting in poor print quality, unless the problem is fixed in prepress. Work is ongoing to improve this feature. You can read a more about MathML integration in InDesign here.
Table Headers
When exporting tables from InDesign to EPUB, rows marked as headers are wrapped in a <thead> tag. The latest version improves accessibility by ensuring that non-empty cells in the header row are now correctly marked as <th scope="col">. This enhancement simplifies the process of creating accessible EPUBs with tabular data. This is a nice fix that will make creating ebooks with tabular data a little easier.
Coming Soon
Early work on exporting images and captions in proper HTML 5 is underway. While it’s been possible to manipulate object styles to get <figure> and <figcaption> in the EPUB export, developers have to edit the code to nest the <figcaption> correctly inside the <figure> tag. Read more in the InDesign 2025 release notes.
More Resources To Master Accessibility
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Love what you’re doing to help everyone improve reading experiences!
Strange enough, Scope is still not set in TH in PDF…
The work of our group is just on EPUB. That issues is, uh, out of scope. (sorry!)
Just a note regarding the MathML equations outputting in RGB black…
The conversion of RGB black can be quickly fixed in Acrobat Pro too (in case the prepress dept. gives one some grief).