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R
Rachael Olmsted County MN
Participating Frequently
January 28, 2026
Question

Adobe Pro 2025 - Perfectly accessibility PDF form not reading with NVDA in Edge, Chrome and Acrobat

  • January 28, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 117 views

I have created a form using Adobe Acrobat.  The source was Microsoft Word and I made sure it passed all of Microsoft’s accessibility requirements and checks before Saved As PDF.  

I manually created each field.  I added field names and tool tips AND tagged every field.  I ran Adobe’s prepare for accessibility checker and it came back perfect.  No accessibility errors.  

BUT when I used NVDA to read the PDF the following happens:

  • When displayed in Adobe Acrobat: Doesn’t announce any of the fields and has trouble reading the rest of the content.
  • When displayed in Chrome: returns “Document inaccessible”
  • When displayed in Edge: Doesn’t read any of the fields.

I am attaching the Help about for Adobe Acrobat, and NVDA.  I am also attaching the PDF form.  

Please tell me why this isn’t working! I can’t teach staff to create accessible forms if the tool we use doesn’t create accessible forms even when the end user is following all of the manufacturer’s rules!

 

1 reply

Randy Hagan
Community Expert
Randy HaganCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 28, 2026

Any time you go outside of Adobe Acrobat products to define/use form-enabled PDFs — especially in mobile platforms — you’re going to get varied and all too often surprising responses. For example, I opened your form in Mozilla Firefox 147.0.2 on Windows 11 and was able to first download, then open and interact with all the fields on your sample page as expected.

 

The only thing I can recommend you do is to test which application(s) may work with your PDF forms, then recommend that your recipients use the ones that work best. Even then there’s no guarantees.

 

Wish I had better news for you, 

 

Randy

R
Rachael Olmsted County MNAuthor
Participating Frequently
January 29, 2026

1st thank you so much for validating the form.  That is a huge relief.  I am deeply grateful. 

I appreciate your reasoning but I didn’t go outside Adobe Acrobat to define the form.  I USED Adobe Acrobat to build the form.  So why can’t I open the form in Adobe Acrobat and read it with NVDA?  It seems that I was able to read pdfs with NVDA in previous versions of Acrobat much more consistently than in this latest 2025 version.  

Does anyone know anything more about the issue with Adobe Acrobat behaving badly when using NVDA?

 

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