Reading Order panel

The panel automatically lists text objects from all pages of your document, and any other objects for which you have set alt text using the Tags panel.

Items can be reordered by dragging them up or down the list. They can be grouped into articles to help you more easily manage the reading order.

Reading order item names

Items are named according to the following rules:

If the corresponding object's layer has a custom name, that name is also the item name.
Otherwise:
- For text objects, the start of the text is used as the item name.
- For non-text objects which have alt text, the alt text is used for both the item name and the layer name.
- For non-text objects which don't have alt text, the object's default layer name is used as the item name¹.
- For articles, which can be used to group other items, Article is used as the default name².

¹ This occurs when an object is manually added to the reading order. You'll need to add alt text for the item to be included in an exported PDF's reading order.

² To rename an article, select it, then click it again.

Settings

The following items are available on the panel:

Reading Order—lists all qualifying objects from your document in the order they will be presented by assistive technologies.
Go to Article—selects the object in the document that corresponds to the selected item in the list. The document view focuses on the object, if it is not already in view.
Add Article—creates a new article. If two or more reading order items are selected, they are added to the article.
Add selected object(s)—adds to the list any objects which are selected but not already in the list.
Remove Article—removes the selected article(s) from the list. If items within an article are selected, they are also removed, otherwise, they are moved to the top level of the list.

Reading order item names

Settings

SEE ALSO: