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L Gryfe
L Gryfe
Inspiring
February 22, 2016
Question

Bug: Acrobat Read Out Loud does not support documents with true typographic characters

  • February 22, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 829 views

I am trying to prepare accessible documents from InDesign (and MS Word) and I have discovered that Acrobat Reader XI and Acrobat Professional X can not read documents that contain true typographic characters such as proper quotation marks, apostrophes, ellipses, and dashes. If I replace the quotation marks with primes (the quotation marks that don't curl), the ellipses with three periods, and the dashes with hyphens, everything reads fine. I do not wish to compromise the quality of the typography in my documents. Does anybody know if Adobe plans to fix this?

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1 reply

a_C_student11733502
a_C_student11733502
Inspiring
February 23, 2016

As long as the characters map to Unicode, there should be no issues from an accessibility standpoint. Read Out Loud is not considered "real" assistive technology, and is not suitable for accessibility testing. Better choices include a screen reader such as JAWS or NVDA, and/or a screen reader emulator such as Callas pdfGoHTML, VIP, or PAC 2. All except JAWS are free, and PAC 2 also includes an excellent accessibility checker (much more thorough than the one built into Acrobat).

L Gryfe
L GryfeAuthor
Inspiring
February 23, 2016

Thanks C. I think I tried another reader and I think it was okay. But even if Acrobat isn't "real" assistive technology - and I accept your point - I still consider this a fairly serious shortcoming of the program. If it offers the opportunity to do even a preliminary review of the accessibility of the document, it should at least be able to read it.

Thx

LG

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