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Dustin_W
Participant
February 9, 2026
Question

Gray hover image descriptions override Comment bubbles

  • February 9, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 74 views

My client pdfs have both auto-generated image descriptions and Comment bubbles.  When I click a comment bubble, I see the comment popup for ONE SECOND before being replaced with the gray image description popup.

I am aware that I can open the Comments pane and read the comments there.  Clicking comments in the comment pane even goes to the page, and wiggles that bubble.  This is helpful, but reverse of how a page is typically read.

How do I disable image description popups? How do I enforce Comment bubbles as priority?

 

The closest I’ve come to solving this myself is Preferences > Commenting > Pop-Up Open Behavior. 

  • Uncheck “Hide comment pop-ups when Comments List is open”
  • Check “Automatically open pop-ups on mouse rollover

That gives me a different style comment popup on hover that persists behind the image description popup.

Clicking the comment bubble causes the different style comment popup to persist, and moving my mouse away from the image hides the image description.

 

To be clear,
* I am not asking how to disable Generative AI Features. 
* I do not need to update Adobe Acrobat Reader. I am on the latest Version 2025.001.21111
* I do not want to re-author the pdfs, I will open them as-is from my client.

What I do want is to click or hover on a comment bubble and read it’s normal comment popup. lol. 

 

TLDR:
Comment bubble popups work flawlessly when they are placed over text or blank areas, but totally fails when placed over images that have an image description.

    1 reply

    Amal.
    Amal.
    Legend
    February 10, 2026

    Hi there 

     

    Hope you are doing well and thank you for reaching out and sharing your observation.
     

    Before I suggest anything, could you answer couple of questions to narrow this down?

    • What OS are you on (Windows or macOS), and roughly which version?
    • Does this happen with all PDFs that have images + alt text, or only specific client files?
    • If you temporarily turn off accessibility/reading features (not AI), does the behavior change at all?

    You’ve already figured out the root cause:
    When a comment bubble sits on top of an image that has an image description (alt text), Acrobat treats the image description tooltip as a higher-priority hover/click target than the comment annotation popup.

    This is why, the comments behave normally over text/blank areas but not with the images with descriptions.
     

    Right now, Acrobat doesn’t expose a setting that lets you prioritize comments over accessibility tooltips on hover/click. 

    Since hover is being hijacked by the image description, forcing popups to persist on click can help:

    You already found:

    Preferences → Commenting → Pop-Up Open Behavior

    Check ‘automatically open pop-ups on mouse rollover’

    Uncheck ‘hide comment pop-ups when Comments List is open’

    This is currently the closest Acrobat gets to “forcing” comments to stay visible 

     

    You may also share your feedback with the engineering team using the link 

    https://acrobat.uservoice.com/forums/926812-acrobat-reader-for-windows-and-mac for their consideration and future implementation.

     

    ~Amal

     

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