Chax Chat Accessibility Podcast

Letterhead may be designed to lock in an organization's branding, but it can also lock meaningful information away from screen reader users. When logos, contact information, board listings, and hyperlinks are placed in Microsoft Word's header or footer, important content may disappear from the reading order and links can create untagged annotation errors in the exported PDF. In this episode of Chax Chat, Dax Castro and Chad Chelius explore what accessible letterhead should contain, why a flattened image is not a reliable solution, and how to decide where letterhead information belongs in the reading order. They also discuss live text, repeated links, first-page treatment, efficient heading navigation, and when bookmarks provide a better experience than trying to make a PDF behave like a website.

Automated accessibility checkers can flag errors, but they cannot always tell you whether a heading is tagged correctly, a nested list has the right structure, or several pages of content never entered the tags tree at all. In this episode of Chax Chat, Dax Castro and Chad Chelius explain what it means to "walk the tags tree" and why this manual review remains essential to accessible PDF remediation. They cover efficient keyboard navigation, Highlight Content, page-to-page reading order, misplaced figures, nested lists, role mapping, when to return to the source file, and why rotated tables require a different approach. They also discuss the judgment behind remediation: how to distinguish a genuine barrier from a technical imperfection and balance user impact, time, and budget without losing sight of accessibility.

Accessibility software does not always move quickly, but several recent updates are changing how accessible documents are created, remediated, and tested. In this episode of Chax Chat, Chad and Dax break down the advances that are actually worth knowing about. They cover accessible PDF forms exported from Word, improved table headers and scope in InDesign, MathML support, PowerPoint reading-order and heading tools, Canva's accessible PDF workflow, new PAC checker tabs, browser-based auto-tagging, and the growing family of IQ tools. They also flag the places where automatic features, standards, and assistive technology still do not line up. Every other week, we unravel accessibility to help you create documents that are more inclusive, compliant, and practical for real users.  

What happens when a PDF tag is technically in the right place, but a screen reader never voices it? In this episode of Chax Chat, Chad and Dax dig into nested tags and the places where the standard, accessibility checkers, and real-world assistive technology do not always agree. They explore captions nested inside figures and tables, QR codes that combine figures and links, table summaries, and multilevel lists. Along the way, they explain why the parent tag often wins, when moving a caption outside its expected structure improves the user experience, and why passing a checker is only part of the job. Every other week, we unravel accessibility to help you create documents that are more inclusive, compliant, and practical for real users.  

Can one InDesign plugin turn hours of PDF remediation into a few minutes of source-document work? In this episode of Chax Chat, Chad and Dax walk through MadeToTag and explain why they consider it essential for creating accessible PDFs from Adobe InDesign. They explore its seven-task workflow, including export-tag mapping, Articles panel review, alternate text management, document metadata, language settings, accessible tables, and PDF export. They also share practical shortcuts, common mistakes, and the features that can dramatically reduce the amount of cleanup required after export. Every other week, we unravel accessibility to help you create documents that are more inclusive, compliant, and practical for real users.