Accessibility Tool Issues (commands not working, figures not recognized)

Question

(Heads up - parts of this will probably be confusing. I'm confused as well. And at my wits end.)

I'm working on making a pdf accessible by tagging reading order and creating alt text for all images. At first it was fairly simple, aside from a few crashes, allowing Acrobat to autotag and then cleaning up and reordering where necessary then checking/adding alt text. However, throughout the course of the project, acrobat has become harder and harder to work with. When cleaning up the reading order, I can no longer delete selected item structure (it's not grayed out, just doesn't work) either by right clicking or by pressing "delete" on my keyboard. Additionally, the alt text that I've written for all but one image in the pdf has disappeared and the tags are no longer recognized as figures. I've tried retagging the image, but to no avail.

In older versions of the document, the alt text still appears on all of the images. But because I've had to make small design changes throughout for readability, those versions are unusable as a whole. I've tried replacing the non-taggable pages with the functioning pages from previous versions (by dragging old pages into the new version, and by dragging new pages into the old, just in case), but the alt text disappears and the image is no longer recognized as a figure.

I've tried restarting the app, restarting my computer, making sure both my computer and Acrobat are up-to-date, combining files, and saving alternate versions and combining. Short of just starting over, I'm not sure what else to do.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm on a mac with the latest OS (Big Sur 11.6) using Acrobat DC and I exported the PDF from Indesign.

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com · Answer

Hi @Lauren-Rain7, Question: if the original source document was created in InDesign, why are you using AutoTag in Acrobat and adding Alt-text in Acrobat? Control the accessibility in your InDesign layout file. If you learn how to do this well, the exported tagged interactive PDF should be mostly complete, including tags and Alt-text and Reading Orders. What's causing you to do the work in Acrobat? Honestly, that's the worst way to make a compliant, accessible PDF: too time-consuming, lousy tools in Acrobat, and a royal PITA (pain in the anatomy). Question: When you make the edits, are you making them in Acrobat or InDesing? It's a well-know bug in Acrobat that once a PDF is tagged, you can't make any editorial changes (like correcting typos, adding/deleting text, formatting text) because it breaks the tags in the tag tree. In most cases, the tags lose the content (the yellow content containers are empty), and a whole lot more crazy things happen. Suggestion:Return to InDesign and build your accessibility features there: tags, reading orders, well-structure tables, hyperlinks, Alt-text, etc.  Done right, you should have very little to do in Acrobat to polish the PDF. Make all editorial changes in the InDesign layout and re-export to PDF.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded