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Participant
November 25, 2019
解決済み

Adobe Pro Accessibility - keeps reading text in graphs

  • November 25, 2019
  • 返信数 2.
  • 3068 ビュー

When I use the read page aloud command in Adobe Pro to check accessibility, in addition to reading the alternative text I've assigned to a graph that I tagged as a figure, it will also read the text in the original graph (ex: y-axis numbers "17000" or x-axis labels "July", "August", etc). Is there a way to stop this? Thank you!

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解決に役立った回答 Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com

As a_C_student1 said, don't use Acrobat's built-in Read Out Loud because it's not a fully featured screen reader. You'll get false positives and false negatives in your testing.

 

What you describe (voicing of the internal text in a graphic, such as the labels in a graphical chart) happens when it's a vector graphic made in a graphics program such as Illustrator or Excel's chart maker. And it is caught with some "real" screen readers, too, not just with Read Out Loud. 

 

This is a shortcoming of Adobe's export-to-PDF utility.

 

Ideally, all of the internal text, bars, labels, etc. in the graphic should be artifacted or hidden from all assistive technologies (A.T.)  and only the Alt-Text on the entire graphic should be voiced by the A.T.  But this capability is only a wish-list item at this time.

 

In the meantime, if you're finding that a real screen reader (JAWS, NVDA, Apple's Voice Over) is catching the labels, bars, and other elements in the graphic, you'll need to manually artifact them in Acrobat Pro:

 

  • Open the Content Panel on the left side.
  • Expand the individual elements and drill down until you can locate the individual labels, bars, etc. You'll see the individual text, letters, or "path" sub-elements. (You can also select some live content and use "Find Content from Selection" in the panel's Options menu.)
  • Right-click on each sub-element and select Create Artifact.
  • On the left, select "Page" for Artifact Type, and ignore the "Attach to Sides" options on the right.

 

Another option is to change the graphic's file type from vector to any of the bitmapped formats, such as PNG or JPG. Ensure that the quality is high enough to be viewed by sighted users: use 200-300 ppi resolution and medium-to-high quality.

 

Hope this helps.

 

返信数 2

a_C_student16379412
Inspiring
December 2, 2019

Please do not use Read Out Load to check accessiblity. Use real assistive technology like NVDA or JAWS, or a real accessibility testing tool like PAC3. 

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Legend
December 3, 2019

As a_C_student1 said, don't use Acrobat's built-in Read Out Loud because it's not a fully featured screen reader. You'll get false positives and false negatives in your testing.

 

What you describe (voicing of the internal text in a graphic, such as the labels in a graphical chart) happens when it's a vector graphic made in a graphics program such as Illustrator or Excel's chart maker. And it is caught with some "real" screen readers, too, not just with Read Out Loud. 

 

This is a shortcoming of Adobe's export-to-PDF utility.

 

Ideally, all of the internal text, bars, labels, etc. in the graphic should be artifacted or hidden from all assistive technologies (A.T.)  and only the Alt-Text on the entire graphic should be voiced by the A.T.  But this capability is only a wish-list item at this time.

 

In the meantime, if you're finding that a real screen reader (JAWS, NVDA, Apple's Voice Over) is catching the labels, bars, and other elements in the graphic, you'll need to manually artifact them in Acrobat Pro:

 

  • Open the Content Panel on the left side.
  • Expand the individual elements and drill down until you can locate the individual labels, bars, etc. You'll see the individual text, letters, or "path" sub-elements. (You can also select some live content and use "Find Content from Selection" in the panel's Options menu.)
  • Right-click on each sub-element and select Create Artifact.
  • On the left, select "Page" for Artifact Type, and ignore the "Attach to Sides" options on the right.

 

Another option is to change the graphic's file type from vector to any of the bitmapped formats, such as PNG or JPG. Ensure that the quality is high enough to be viewed by sighted users: use 200-300 ppi resolution and medium-to-high quality.

 

Hope this helps.

 

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |
Dar29
Known Participant
June 15, 2023

Hi, I am having this problem, but even after I manually tag the items as artifacts. Are there any other work-arounds?

Amal.
Community Manager
Community Manager
November 26, 2019

Hi there,

 

We are sorry for the trouble. As described above, you want Acrobat DC to stop reading the text in graphs

 

You may try the troubleshooting steps provided in the help article here (https://helpx.adobe.com/in/acrobat/using/touch-reading-order-tool-pdfs.html#check_and_correct_reading_order_acrobat_pro)

 

Let us know how it goes

 

Regards

Amal

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Legend
December 3, 2019

Unfortunately, the TURO tool (touch up reading order tool) no longer correctly artifacts the invidual elements within a graphic, as the original poster described. It became incapable of this task (or broken IMHO) in Acrobat Pro 2017, IIRC.  Also "Artifact" from the Tag Panel was broken at the same time.

 

Don't know why these tools were disabled for this task by Adobe.

 

The only remaining method that works is via the Content Panel described below. That's it.

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