I used to be an Apple consultant, but I also tend to be a risk taker, so while I tell others not to update, I tend to update or upgrade. But this worked several weeks ago, and now it's a lesson in frustration. At this point, I simply can't make ADA compliant PDFs using Adobe's tools. InDesign doesn't crash, but it's possible it's putting something bad in the PDFs I export (both through the normal preset menu or the Export menu). Interactive PDFs come over missing tags. Fresh, new PDFs just exported using a preset I have start out fine in Acrobat, but quickly either lose graphics randomly, crash incessently or just don't work properly. Drag an element in the reading order, it might work, but it will probably crash. Try to remove an element from the page structure? Nope, does nothing. Periodically a giant figure box appears over every page in the entire PDF as one object. Meaning you can zoom out and there's a single figure box over the entire view of all pages.
I downloaded Acrobat 2020. Same issue, which makes me think it's Indesign (or Big Sur, but it worked fine a few weeks ago). Maybe Apple broke something in the most recent Big Sur update. But it seems to be ONLY the Accessibility tools that aren't working right.
I'm going to try to roll back Indesign or open a PDF in Preview and resave it just to see if that works as a better base, but honestly, at this point I'm praying someone out there actually makes a BETTER tool for making ADA compliant PDFs than Adobe.
I know, I know, I should have researched it...but it worked a few weeks ago well enough that I could get my work done. Now? Completely useless. Sorry, I'm venting now. I need to take a lunch break, calm down and then see if I can contact Adobe support directly and send them some crash info and see if they can help.
Oh, the icing on the cake? Acrobat crashes over and over but the crash report popups don't appear right away. A few minutes later I'll get like 10 of them in a row as I'm trying to work. It's like Acrobat is saying "you think you were frustrated before? Lol, watch this!"
That's one of the saddest stories I've read! Below, some workarounds that might help get you a more stable design environment. (I'm a former Apple and Microsoft dealer, systems integrator for design software, and beta tester for many companies. And accessibility expert.)
- Traditonally, InDesign has been more stable on Windows than on Apple. I don't know if that's an Apple thing or an Adobe thing, but we run both operating systems in my shop and all our Macs are dual-boot workstations (via BootCamp). When the InDesign/Acrobat combo is unstable on our Macs, we reboot into Windows (on the same workstation) and the problems, usually, are eliminated. Remember, you get 2 installations with your Creative Cloud subscription so you can have Indy installed on your Windows partition as well as on your Mac partition. I know BootCamp isn't included in Big Sur, but Parallels just announced their emulator (See this Gizmodo review https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2021/04/you-can-now-run-windows-10-on-apples-m1-macs-sort-of/). Given the behemoth files we process, I prefer to run Windows natively via BootCamp, and I'm hoping that the great hackers who originally created it will release it for Silicon. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boot_Camp_(software).
- The Made To Tag plugin by Axaio Software is an excellent accessible PDF tool. https://www.axaio.com/doku.php/en:products:madetotag I don't know if they've retooled for M1/Big Sur, but worth looking into. It always creates a cleaner tag tree than Adobe's PDF exporter that's built into InDesign. The programming team behind the software is excellent and also produces many of the industry's pre-press tools. And MTT was picked up by QuarkXPress for its accessibility tool set. The company's founder is a former member of the ISO committee that writes the PDF/UA-1 accessibility specification.
- I don't have a recommendation for correcting PDF's idosyncracies, but look into any of the following tools that can help:
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