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Participant
October 30, 2024
Question

How do I merge containers within an existing tag?

  • October 30, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 1573 views

I have a PDF that I'm attempting to make more accessible. I'm using Adobe Acrobat Pro (Continuous Release | Version 2004.003.20180). I ran the auto-tag function, which did a very good job. But there are some issues I'd like to fix. This document is very simple: just a single column of text divided into paragraphs. The tag and container structure, for most of the paragraphs, looks like this: 

 

But, in some paragraphs, the content is broken up into multiple containers. Here's a typical case, where the first line of the paragraph is in its own container, and the rest of the paragraph is in another one: 

From a scemantic markup standpoint, this bothers me, though, from an accessibility standpoint, it likely doesn't matter. But there are other situations where I suspect it would matter, where some of the containers overlap: 

The H1 tag at the top of this same document--the only thing in it that isn't in a P tag, is a similar case. Rather than having everything in one container in an H1, there are multiple containers, though they don't overlap: 

I'm new to Acrobat's accessibility tags feature, but I'm well versed in HTML/CSS/JS. It seems there should be an easy way to merge these containers w/o having to manually retag the entire document. It's tagged mostly very well. But there are a few paragraphs and this H1 that, as far as I can tell, need or would benefit from adjustment. 

Thanks for any help you can provide. I haven't found any videos or guides which address this direct problem. I don't have access to the original file, just the PDF. 

2 replies

lgranger
Participant
April 25, 2026

I’m trying to do the same and it seems like what I’m doing should work (tried in both the tags panel and with the reading order tool, but a screen reader (NVDA) still will not read them together as one paragraph. So frustrating. Did you ever figure it out?

lgranger
Participant
April 25, 2026

If you didn’t, I think I did. Haven’t confirmed by trying, but AI told me…. you can’t just adjust the tags. You have to modify the CONTENT panel too (which goes against everything I’ve been told about screen readers relying ONLY on tag structure). Message me if you want. I’m giving it a try now.

 

lgranger
Participant
April 25, 2026

Wow. I read you should be very careful in the content panel and touch is as little as possible. Turns out, however, that THAT is the fix. All you have to do, is in the content panel, drag the fragment of the sentence up into the same container as the rest of the sentence and the tag structure fixes itself. It’s that easy!

Adobe Employee
November 1, 2024

Hi @WheatAtUARK ,

 

Please try the documenation at https://helpx.adobe.com/in/acrobat/using/editing-document-structure-content-tags.html to know how to edit the tags in tag panel. Hope this helps

 

Regards

Ravi

Participant
November 6, 2024

That's a 3,600-word article with multiple sections. I've bookmarked it for reference, as it seems useful in a general sense. Can you point me to what steps and/or what section of that article might address my particular issue?