New Accessibility Features in InDesign 2025

Laura Brady Laura Brady

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.

Screenshot of the General tab of the EPUB export menu highlighting the middle of the screen where the page navigation button is checked, and the pagination source drop-down menu is activated.

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. 

Screenshot of the Insert MathML window. Raw MathML is on the left with the equation preview on the right.

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

Join us at our next Design + Accessibility Summit, the essential HOW-TO event for design professionals who need to master accessibility.

It's no secret that accessibility is a hot topic. In fact, ensuring your documents are accessible is not just a good idea: it's the law. Whether you're extending your company's DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) focus, expanding your market to include the estimated 25% of the population who have disabilities, or safeguarding your company against legal risks, it's important to make accessibility a business priority.

Creative professionals must learn how to design documents that are accessible for people with vision and hearing impairments, mobility challenges, cognitive, and other disabilities. And those who ramp up their knowledge and expertise in accessibility will find themselves in high demand supporting their business' efforts; while those who don't will risk falling behind.

At The Design + Accessibility Summit, you will learn practical techniques for building accessible documents with InDesign, Acrobat, PowerPoint, and other tools widely used by creative professionals.

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This article was last modified on October 17, 2024

This article was first published on October 17, 2024

Comments (4)

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  1. David Creamer
    January 17, 2025

    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).

    Reply
  2. Frans vd Geest
    October 18, 2024

    Strange enough, Scope is still not set in TH in PDF…

    Reply
    1. Laura Brady
      October 18, 2024

      The work of our group is just on EPUB. That issues is, uh, out of scope. (sorry!)

      Reply
  3. Mariano
    October 17, 2024

    Love what you’re doing to help everyone improve reading experiences!

    Reply
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