Reading Order Panel

[Patrick Connor]

Apps: Publisher
Platforms: macOS, Windows and iPad

Reading Order Panel

V2.6 introduces the Reading Order panel to improve the accessibility of PDFs produced in Affinity. The panel gives you control over the order in which screen readers and other assistive technology read PDF content.

Where to find it

It is accessed via Window > Reading Order on desktop, and via the ellipsis below the panel icons on iPad.

If you have Acrobat Pro (not Reader), tags related to reading order can be viewed in its 'Accessibility tags' pane.

How to use

Text objects are automatically added to the Reading Order panel. At the panel’s lower-right corner, the ‘Add Article’ button can be used to group and order related objects. Articles indicate this relationship to the assistive technologies. An Article can be given a more representative name by selecting it, then clicking its name and typing, but Article names are only used for identification in Affinity.

Non-text objects, such as images, for which you provide alt text on the Tags Panel are automatically added to the reading order. (Note that removing an object’s alt text also removes it from the reading order.)

The button to the right of Add Article adds the selected object to the reading order. Use it to add objects for which alt text is not set – perhaps because it hasn’t yet been provided to you. If you don’t add alt text to such objects prior to export, the objects simply won’t be included in your PDF’s reading order.

With regards to accessibility tags in text, you can set any text style so that it encloses text in 'Paragraph tags' (<P> in Acrobat Pro’s ‘Accessibility tags’ pane) or 'Heading tags' (<H1> to <H6> in Acrobat Pro). To do this, use the Export Tags section of the Text Style Editor.

The reading order can be changed by dragging items up or down the reading order and dropping them, in a similar way to the Layers Panel. When dragging an item, a blue line indicates the item's new position if dropped.

To locate the object that corresponds to an item, select the item in the reading order and then click 'Go to Article’ at the bottom left of the panel. This focuses the document view on the object and selects the object.

Any item you manually add to the reading order can be removed by selecting it on the panel and then clicking 'Remove Article (the ‘trash can’ icon). Items automatically added to the reading order, such as text objects and images with alt text, cannot be removed from it.

To omit an item from a PDF’s accessibility tags on output, click its adjacent green check mark to change it to a red cross, which indicates the item is excluded from the reading order and so will not have an accessibility tag in PDF output.

[Affinity Info Bot]

Known Issues in this feature
A list of unresolved issues for this feature, reported by users

Released Fixes
A list of issues for this feature, available in the current beta build

• AF-4759 - Reading Order Panel Reveal Arrow Position
• AF-4757 - The PDF Export Tag is missing in the Base Text Style Settings Summary in Publisher...
• AF-4784 - Double clicking item in Reading Order doesn't perform 'Go To Article' on macOS
• AF-4785 - Text Style Editor's Export Tag options are truncated in other languages
• AF-4787 - [iOS] Reading Order Panel icons do not switch to mono
• AF-4788 - [macOS] Reading Order Panel icons require a restart when switching UI Style to Mono on macOS
• AF-4789 - Clicking Go to Article in the Reading Order Panel Requires Two Clicks When the Page is Zoomed In
• AF-4842 - [Win] Reading Order Panel icons require a restart when switching UI Style to Mono
• AF-4843 - [iOS] Reading Order Panel icons require a restart when switching UI Style to Mono
• AF-4844 - [iOS] Double clicking item in Reading Order doesn't perform 'Go To Article'
• AF-4894 - Body Text Style Includes Unnecessary Explicit Properties
• AF-4949 - Selecting Master Text Frames as 'Content' fails to show them in the list
• AF-4950 - Reading Order adds an additional frame for edited Master Page content
• AF-4952 - Hovering over objects in the Reading Order panel will highlight them suggesting they can be nested like Articles
• AF-4953 - Multiple selected objects in the Reading Order Panel don't change state when toggled.
• AF-4957 - Adding Linked Text Frames to a Facing Page Master Incorrectly Adds an Entry to the Reading Order Panel
• AF-4963 - Deleting Text from Publication Page Text Frames Based on a Master Fails to Remove the Reading Order Panel Entry
• AF-4966 - Adding a Tagged Image to a Master Page Incorrectly Adds it to the Reading Order Panel
• AF-4967 - Empty Shape Text Frames are included in the Reading Order
• AF-4968 - Editing text on a Master Page as 'Content' will to show the changed text in the Reading Order Panel
• AF-4970 - Adding a Tagged Image Unnecessarily Expands all Collapsed Articles
• AF-4977 - Object Selection Within Articles to Omit its PDF Accessibility Tag on Export Can Highlight the Incorrect Object
• AF-4974 - Moving an Object to Bottom of an Article in the Reading Order Panel Fails to Honour the Drop Zone
• AF-4978 - Objects Nested Inside an Article Can't be Visually or Physically Excluded from the Reading Order
• AF-4981 - Unable to collapse articles in the iPad Reading Order Panel
• AF-5025 - Clicking Reading Order Panel Article Disclosure Triangles Sometimes Fails to Close the Article
• AF-5028 - Article Positioning is Not Honoured if an Object has been Manually Re-ordered in the Reading Order Panel
• AF-5030 - Reading Order Panel Fails to Scroll on Windows
• AF-5037 - Empty Picture Frames and Untagged Images are Incorrectly Added to the Reading Order Panel
• AF-5051 - The Y Order is Not Always Honoured When Adding Objects to the Reading Order Panel
• AF-5057 - [macOS] Adding a Tagged Image Unnecessarily Expands all Collapsed Articles
• AF-5067 - Objects Nested Inside an Article but Excluded from the Reading Order are Still Read by Screen Readers
• AF-5070 - Reading Order Panel Tooltip Wording Differs Between Mac and Windows
• AF-5090 - [Win] Reading Order Panel icons do not switch to mono
• AF-5092 - [Win] Moving an Object to Bottom of an Article in the Reading Order Panel Fails to Honour the Drop Zone
• AF-5093 - [iOS] Hovering over objects in the Reading Order panel will highlight them suggesting they can be nested like Articles
• AF-5146 - Page Thumbnails and the Reading Order Panel are Not Automatically Populated When Editing an Embedded PDF
• AF-5152 - [macOS] Toggling non selected Reading Order Exclude option will toggle selected item
• AF-5205 - Running a Data Merge Toggles all Merged Reading Order Panel Content Off

[Hangman]

The PDF Export Tag is missing in the Base Text Style Settings Summary in Publisher...

[Hangman]

A slight cosmetic discrepancy with the positioning of the Reveal Arrow in the Reading Order Panel between Mac and Windows... On Mac, the arrow is almost touching the <Article> on Windows it's well-spaced...

[Evaluation complete.]

Another panel? I don’t know your plans and all the possibilities, but maybe an accessibility panel with related accessibility settings could be an idea; it would make it easier for everyone to work with.

[Bryan Rieger]

A couple of things that would be helpful.

1. provide page number(s) of the item. ie; Title (1), Introduction (1-12), Chapter 2 (13-47), etc as it would give you some indication where the text is and where it runs to.
2. provide some indication of any accessibility tags associated with the text via styles ie; <h1>, <p>, etc. This would provide you with some indication of whether or not the text has an accessible style/tag associated with it, and which one. Otherwise the user is required to manually check all of these to confirm they are indeed what was expected.

So essentially each item would contain the following data:

Frame Text/3 {text frame}, 1-4 {page(s)}, <p> {tag}

Also, why do I need to select and item and click the 'go to' button at the bottom left, when it would be far more intuitive to simply click (or double-click) the item and jump to it directly.

Edited October 22, 2024 by Bryan Rieger
Added bit about the 'go to' functionality.

[MikeTO]

I haven't spent much time with this yet but some minor tidbits.

Auto names: If I create a text frame on a document page, its name will be the first characters. If I create a text frame on a master page, it name will be Frame Text unless there is text in it on the master in which case that text will be used. Since we should all be using master frames for long docs, that means all article names will default to Frame Text which isn't ideal. I opened one of my books and saw a lot of <Filler Text>. Could it use the actual text even for master layer text frames?

Auto tagging: If Heading 2 is set to H2 and I create Heading 3 based on Heading 2, it might be nice to default Heading 3 to H3 so I don't have to set it manually.

Translation cropping: The TSE's Export Tags pane will need a bit of TLC - the labels are cut off outside of English.

 

Colour/mono toggle: The panel's checkmark colour does't respond to the mono/colour UI toggle unless the panel is closed and re-opened. The rest of Affinity's UI changes immediately.

Checkmark colour: The green checkmarks are surprisingly bright in Light Mode and the grey checkmarks are very hard to see on the selected row.

 

2 hours ago, Ingelise said:

Another panel? I don’t know your plans and all the possibilities, but maybe an accessibility panel with related accessibility settings could be an idea; it would make it easier for everyone to work with.

Reading order is also for ePub. InDesign has this same panel but named it Articles. I really like the Reading Order name which is more descriptive than Articles. We're stuck with the term Article for the items in the list though as it's an Acrobat PDF term.

[Sean P]

19 hours ago, Bryan Rieger said:

A couple of things that would be helpful.

1. provide page number(s) of the item. ie; Title (1), Introduction (1-12), Chapter 2 (13-47), etc as it would give you some indication where the text is and where it runs to.
2. provide some indication of any accessibility tags associated with the text via styles ie; <h1>, <p>, etc. This would provide you with some indication of whether or not the text has an accessible style/tag associated with it, and which one. Otherwise the user is required to manually check all of these to confirm they are indeed what was expected.

So essentially each item would contain the following data:

Frame Text/3 {text frame}, 1-4 {page(s)}, <p> {tag}

Also, why do I need to select and item and click the 'go to' button at the bottom left, when it would be far more intuitive to simply click (or double-click) the item and jump to it directly.

Hi Bryan,
The page numbers is a tricky one as text frames don't always flow sequentially and might be found on different ranges of pages. That said, it could potentially be of use if it maybe displayed the page that text flow started on? I will pass the feedback along.

With regards to indication of associated tags - that isn't possible. The tags themselves are applied on a paragraph by paragraph basis (as they're part of the paragraph text style, so you might have multiple different tags for each entry in the Reading Order Panel.

19 hours ago, Bryan Rieger said:

Also, why do I need to select and item and click the 'go to' button at the bottom left, when it would be far more intuitive to simply click (or double-click) the item and jump to it directly.

I believe this is a bug, as it is actually possible to do that on Windows! I will get that logged.

[Sean P]

17 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Checkmark colour: The green checkmarks are surprisingly bright in Light Mode and the grey checkmarks are very hard to see on the selected row.

 

I assume the second screenshot is of the icons when using Mono icons?

[Bryan Rieger]

The checkmark (and X) icons are also surprisingly LARGE (make it feel awkward to read/scan), and feel like bad placeholder art (ie: different line widths).

Should I assume these icons are also temporary placeholders?

[Hangman]

If you have multiple objects on the same page but are zoomed into the page so you can only see say the first object, selecting the object in the Reading Order panel and then clicking Go to Article doesn't take you to the Article until you click Go to Article a second time, the first Go to Article click selects the object, the second takes you to the Article...

If the object is on a different page Go to Article takes you there with a single click...

[MikeTO]

53 minutes ago, Sean P said:

I assume the second screenshot is of the icons when using Mono icons?

That's right, thanks.

[MikeTO]

If you open a 2.5 studio preset, you will be unable to open the Reading Order panel. While you can reset the studio, a less drastic workaround is to quit Publisher and launch it again and then of course save a 2.6 preset. We've seen this issue before with other new panels so I went looking for it.

[itsjop]

Hi there, I'm trying to use the new Reading Order pane in order to have my cake and eat it too, by using it to manually specify the read order for a more graphical resume and not having to use a plain-text one. However, it doesn't seem to be having any sort of impact on the exported PDF on a variety of scans and OCR software, reading identically across several scanners and PDF readers, both before and after the Reading Order changes were specified. Is there something I may be missing with this new feature?

 

Edited October 29, 2024 by itsjop

[Hangman]

Hi @itsjop and welcome to the forums,

6 hours ago, itsjop said:

Hi there, I'm trying to use the new Reading Order pane in order to have my cake and eat it too, by using it to manually specify the read order for a more graphical resume and not having to use a plain-text one. However, it doesn't seem to be having any sort of impact on the exported PDF on a variety of scans and OCR software, reading identically across several scanners and PDF readers, both before and after the Reading Order changes were specified. Is there something I may be missing with this new feature?

When you say "it doesn't seem to be having any sort of impact on the exported PDF on a variety of scans and OCR software" can you elaborate... The reading order gives you control over the order in which screen readers and other assistive technology will read the PDF content so I'm unsure how that would be impacted via scanning or OCR software...

If you re-order the <Articles> in the Reading Panel and then re-export to PDF you should find that whichever assistive technology or PDF reader you're using will now read the content in the new order specified in the Reading Order panel, something you can test in Acrobat Reader...

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "Clicking Go to Article in the Reading Order Panel Requires Two Clicks When the Page is Zoomed In" (REF: AF-4789) has been fixed by the developers in the latest beta build (2.6.0.2831). The fix is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Affinity Info Bot to notify us.

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "The PDF Export Tag is missing in the Base Text Style Settings Summary in Publisher..." (REF: AF-4757) has been fixed by the developers in the latest beta build (2.6.0.2831). The fix is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Affinity Info Bot to notify us.

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "[macOS] Reading Order Panel icons require a restart when switching UI Style to Mono on macOS" (REF: AF-4788) has been fixed by the developers in the latest beta build (2.6.0.2831). The fix is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Affinity Info Bot to notify us.

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "[macOS] Double clicking item in Reading Order doesn't perform 'Go To Article' on macOS" (REF: AF-4784) has been fixed by the developers in the latest beta build (2.6.0.2831). The fix is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Affinity Info Bot to notify us.

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "Text Style Editor's Export Tag options are truncated in other languages" (REF: AF-4785) has been fixed by the developers in the latest beta build (2.6.0.2831). The fix is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Affinity Info Bot to notify us.

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "[macOS] Reading Order Panel Reveal Arrow Position" (REF: AF-4759) has been fixed by the developers in the latest beta build (2.6.0.2831). The fix is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Affinity Info Bot to notify us.

[Hangman]

In a new document, the Body Text Style has two explicit properties that it shouldn't need because it inherits them from the Base Style...

The Style Settings Summary should show Base + [No changes] as is the case when creating a new text style based on the Base Text Style...

Current Body Text Style - Left | New Text Style Based on the Base Text Style - Right

[MikeTO]

I'm finding this panel works well with test documents but not with real-world documents. For my history book, it lists 40 virtually identical placeholder names and it takes too much time to figure out which is which. Even if I eventually figure out that one of the many "<Filler Text>/2" articles is actually chapter 7, I can't rename it to chapter 7 to remember it for later.

Auto article names: The auto names are the biggest issue. Everybody who uses the reading order panel should be using master pages and every text object from a master page will have a placeholder name even if the text object has real text on the document page:

• "<Filler Text>" - if the text object has filler text on the master
• "Frame Text" or "Art Text" or "Table" or "Shape Text" or "Curve Path Text" - if the text object is blank or has a space on the master
• "real text" - if the text object has real text on the master

I also think that the names such as "Frame Text" should be in <> or something else to differentiate them from named articles to help make named articles easier to pick out of a long list.

Note also that short table names will have |'s separating the empty table cells so you might get "Testing|||||||" as a table name.

Can't rename articles: We can only rename articles we create manually, the automatic ones cannot be renamed.

Selected article bug: If I click in a text object on a master page, the article is not selected in the panel like it is for an object on a document page. This makes it very difficult to figure out which of the auto names corresponds to the article I'm editing.

Duplicate articles with split masters bug: I haven't reproduced this with a test document yet, but With split masters in a 2.5 document, I have a spread in 2.6 with 2 frames and 4 articles. Going to 2 of the articles selects the frame on the page and in the Layers panel. Going to the other 2 frames selects the same frame on the page but nothing in the Layers panel. I assume this has to do with having applied facing-page masters to left and right sides of a spread in 2.5 and 2.6 tidying up and hiding the duplicate frames but still creating articles for them.

Update: Here's a 2.6 test document for this bug. It happens with split masters and linked frames on the master.

1. Open this document - there is one article for the frame on page 2 (page 3 is clear)
2. Type into frame on page 2 to replace the filler text - there will now be 3 articles
3. Undo - there will now be 2 articles

split26.afpub

Edited November 4, 2024 by MikeTO
added test doc and steps

[MikeTO]

Auto scroll: Selecting an object on the document page selects the item in the panel but doesn't scroll the panel to the item, making it hard to find items when you have dozens of articles listed.

Incorrect drop zone highlighting: The panel highlights each article as I drag another article over it which will lead the user into believing they can drop any article onto any other, but they can really only drop onto manually-created articles - the panel shouldn't highlight articles I can't drop onto

Icons: I imagine the checkmark and X are placeholders but just in case they aren't, I don't think they match Affinity's design. The checkmark is curved and the checkmark and X have different stroke widths.

Questions: Can you confirm that there's no need to group articles as an article? For example, I don't think you need to group your introduction and copyright pages as Front Matter unless you want to for your own convenience because as long as they're in the right order, they'll be read out correctly by a screen or ePub reader? And the article names aren't important for the reader because those are just for use within Affinity? Thank you.

[MikeTO]

Automatic article creation: While I like what you did with automatically creating articles as opposed to having to do it manually like in InDesign, I think it might be better to add a panel button to generate articles for stories without articles than to generate an article every time a story is created. The articles lists for my books are a mess of stuff I wouldn't want as articles. Footers, TOC, index, hidden frames, etc. For example, my history book has 72 automatically generated articles of which I want to include only 11 as articles. I would have to click the toggle 61 times to exclude the rest so I'd find it easier to have a generate articles button.

Add Article doesn't auto scroll: When I add an article it adds it to the bottom of the panel but doesn't auto scroll to make it visible. I actually expected it add the article below the currently-selected article but I must scroll to the bottom and drag it back to where I wanted in the middle of the list.

Double-click: I expected to be able to double-click an article to go to an article but it doesn't do anything.