Automatically generated text descriptions of pictures

Hi there,

Hope you are doing well and thanks for reaching out, there is no global setting in Acrobat (or Acrobat Reader) to switch this off. Text like “picture containing text and font” is the signature style of Microsoft Office's automatic alt text. When images are added in Word or PowerPoint, Office writes that description into the image's accessibility properties. On export to PDF, it ends up in the figure's accessibility tag (/Alt), and Acrobat dutifully shows it as a tooltip when you hover. So Acrobat isn't generating the text, it's just displaying what's already baked into the PDF.
 

You can try the steps below and see if that works:

1. Fix it at the source (best if you create the PDFs). In Word/PowerPoint go to File >Options > Accessibility and clear the “Automatically generate alt text for me” checkbox. Then remove existing alt text from images (right-click the image >View Alt Text >clear it, or mark as decorative). Re-export to PDF and the hover tooltips are gone. Microsoft’s documentation walks through both:
   

2. Strip alt text from an existing PDF (requires Acrobat Pro, not free Reader). Two documented approaches:
   • Per-figure edit via the Tags panel: right-click a <Figure> tag >Properties >clear the Alternate Text field. Adobe documents this in “Create and verify PDF accessibility”: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/create-verify-pdf-accessibility.html  and in “Edit document structure with the Content and Tags panels”: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/editing-document-structure-content-tags.html 
   • Faster for whole documents: All tools >Prepare for accessibility >Reading Order >Clear Page Structure on each page (two-page scroll view speeds it up). This wipes the figure tags so the tooltips disappear. 
Note: it also removes accessibility tagging, so only do this on copies and not on documents that need to stay accessible for screen-reader users.
 

3. If you only have free Acrobat Reader and the PDF was made by someone else, there is genuinely no way to suppress the tooltips on your end,  the author has to remove the alt text, or you’d need Acrobat Pro to do it yourself.

Hope this information will help.

~Amal