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thiloh97323548
thiloh97323548
Participant
January 25, 2024
Question

Accessibility of PDFS / paragraph character / Read aloud function

  • January 25, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 531 views

Hi, a question, maybe someone has the same problem:
The paragraph character "§" is not read aloud in the PDFs I create. All other characters ($%&...) are read aloud. Does anyone know if this can be fixed? Thank you very much!

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Amal.
Community Manager
Amal.Community Manager
Community Manager
January 25, 2024

Hi @thiloh97323548

 

Hope you are doing well and thanks for reaching out.

 

What is the version of the Acrobat DC you are using? To check the version go to Help > About Acrobat and make sure you have the recent version 23.08.20470 installed. Go to Help > Check for updates and reboot the computer once.
 
Also try to repair the installation from the help menu (Win Only) and see if that works.

 

It appears that characters that use the option key to generate them - such as en dashes (option-hyphen), ellipses (...), apostrophes, etc. - seem to break the Read Out Loud feature. If you change the en dash to a regular hyphen, the ellipsis to three periods, and the proper typographic apostrophe to a prime (i.e. turn off smart quotes), then Read Out Loud would work.

 

Marking a reply or response “Correct” will help future users with the same issue quickly identify the correct answer

 

~Amal

thiloh97323548
thiloh97323548Author
Participant
January 25, 2024

Thank you very much for your feedback! Unfortunately it does not work for the "§". It is also not an "Adobe problem", e.g. the "§" is not read out in Word either. I'll keep looking. In an emergency you just have to write it out.

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Legend
January 25, 2024

Whether special characters like  § (section) and  ¶ (paragraph mark) are voiced depends mostly on the reader technology, not on Acrobat or any other software program.

 

What screen reader / text-to-speech reader are you using? Is it the Read Aloud utility built into Acrobat?  Or something else?

 

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |
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