The complete course in one video
All twelve lessons in a row, with a title card before each one, in twelve minutes. Good for a first overview; the single lessons below are easier to return to when you are stuck on one step.
Video course · 12 lessons
From the first click to the validated PDF
Twelve short videos take one real InDesign document from its first check to a PDF that passes PDF/UA-1 — every finding, every fix, in the order the panel suggests. Watch them in sequence, or jump to the step you are stuck on.
Every video has an English and a German audio track and subtitles in all eleven interface languages — switch them in the player. All twelve lessons together take a quarter of an hour. On YouTube they are also available as a course that remembers your progress and as a playlist.
What you need to follow along
Any current InDesign and either edition of the plugin. The free TagAlly Check shows you every finding the videos show; the repairs, the export and the validation from lesson 4 onwards need TagAlly Pro. The practice document used in the videos is the plugin’s own demo file, so you can reproduce every step on your own machine.
Nothing is loaded from YouTube until you press play. The preview images come from our own server. Clicking the play button loads the video from YouTube, which then processes your connection data — see the privacy notice.
The lessons
Lessons 1 to 3 set everything up. Lessons 4 to 10 follow the seven steps of the panel. Lessons 11 and 12 export, validate and read the proof.
Buying the plugin
Where to get TagAlly Pro: in our own shop, with team licences at a discount from five seats and perpetual licences for institutions, or in the Adobe Marketplace, which sells single licences and installs the plugin for you. Same plugin, same price.
Set up the helper program
Export, repair and validation run in a small helper program on your own computer. One click sets it up; this lesson shows what happens, what it needs, and how to tell that it is running. It also shows where to get veraPDF, the free validator — the written version is in the FAQ.
Run the check and read the results
One click checks the whole document. This lesson explains the traffic lights, the maturity bar, the four severity levels and how the seven steps are ordered — so you always know what to do next.
Basics: title and language
Every accessible PDF needs a document title and a language. Set both from the panel, then find the passages that have no language of their own and assign one.
Tag mappings: paragraph styles become structure
Paragraph styles without a PDF tag are the most common reason a tagged PDF still fails. Map them in one pass, and rename a style whose name collides with a standard structure type.
Text and lists
Typed bullets, local list formatting, empty spacer paragraphs and links labelled with their bare address: four small habits that break the structure, and the button that fixes each of them.
Headings
A heading hierarchy that skips a level reads as noise to a screen reader. See how the panel finds the skipped level and how changing the tag of one style fixes every occurrence.
Artifacts and decoration
Rules, colour fields and ornaments must be excluded from the reading order, not described. Mark them all as artifacts in one step — and learn to spot the one graphic that is content after all.
Alt texts, tables and contrast
Write alt texts with the thumbnails in front of you, take them from image metadata where they exist, give tables a header row, and fix the caption whose grey is too light — measured against its real background.
Reading order
Record the reading order by clicking the objects in sequence; the panel numbers each click on screen. Then deal with what is left: objects that belong neither to the reading order nor to the artifacts.
Export, repair and validate
Export the tagged PDF from the panel, let the helper program add what InDesign leaves out, and validate the result against PDF/UA-1 with veraPDF — all from one card.
The report and the structure view
Read the conformance report — machine result, violation table and the manual checklist — and open the structure view to see the tag tree the way a screen reader walks it.
Ready to try it on your own document?
TagAlly Check shows you every finding for free. TagAlly Pro adds the repairs, the export and the proof.
Try TagAlly Pro free for 30 days Start free with TagAlly Check
Questions the videos do not answer? The FAQ covers most of them, and support is one e-mail away.