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sunhawk
sunhawk
Participant
May 11, 2026
Question

Acrobat crashes when using Visual Highlight option on NVDA screen reader

  • May 11, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 8 views

When using the screen reader NVDA, there is an option in the settings called Visual Highlight that adds a coloured outline around the current focus item, this is very useful to see where you are currently located in the PDF.  Unfortunately, lately there is an Acrobat bug where turning on Visual Highlight when using Acrobat to read a PDF results in Acrobat crashing.  Can this please be fixed in Acrobat?

This seems to happen most often when moving by keyboard to a link, but may happen for other tagged items as well. I emailed the NVDA company who confirmed the issue is not with NVDA but with Acrobat.

The Visual Highlight option is also very useful for QA and creating educational screenshots about using NVDA for accessible PDF testing, I would consider this a High Priority ticket!

      1 reply

      Amal Jaiswal
      Community Manager
      Amal JaiswalCommunity Manager
      Community Manager
      May 13, 2026

      Hi there 

       

      Hope you are doing well and thanks for reaching out. We are sorry for the trouble you are experiencing.

       

      Have you started experiencing this issue recently with an update? or was it occuring earlier as well? To get this logged with engineering and reproduced on our side, could you share a few details:

      • Acrobat version and track (Help > About Adobe Acrobat  e.g., 2024.x continuous, or the classic track build number)
      • Operating system and build (Windows 10/11, version)
      • NVDA version 
      • Whether the crash happens on any PDF or only specific ones  if you have a non-sensitive sample file that reliably reproduces it, that would be ideal. A simple tagged PDF with a few links is fine if that's enough to trigger it.
      • Approximate frequency  does it crash on the first focused link, or after navigating through several elements?
      • Crash logs, as described here https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/collect-logs-crash-freeze.html

      Also a small video recording of the steps you are taking and the issue as it occurs would be very helpful for further investigation.

       

      ~Amal

       

       

       

       

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