Latest Acrobat Pro update has broken the accessibility tools

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
July 24, 2023
3 replies
3441 views

Oh my gosh, the recent update to Acrobat Pro has destroyed the accessibility tools. Tagging is all messed up, and alt text and links don't always carry over from Word and PowerPoint. By law (Section 508) documents intended for the public are required to provide acessible documents. Not having functioning accessibility tools in Acrobat makes this impossible.

I don't see any way to revert to an earlier version of Acrobat via Creative Cloud. Anybody know of another way to do so?

Modern Acrobat

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Correct answer Mimi-MTC

SOLVED!

So, despite Creative Cloud saying Acrobat was “up to date,” it actually wasn’t!

I uninstalled and reinstalled Acrobat, and it was different. Exporting worked like a charm, all the tags are where they should be, no more nested in <span> tags (which I now call "<spam>" tags…), etc.

Normally I would uninstall/reinstall, but was thrown off by CC telling me it was up to date. Moving forward, when anything is acting wonky, I'll do that first.

@Frans v.d. Geest thanks for your help!

M

Mimi-MTCAuthorCorrect answer

Inspiring

SOLVED!

So, despite Creative Cloud saying Acrobat was “up to date,” it actually wasn’t!

I uninstalled and reinstalled Acrobat, and it was different. Exporting worked like a charm, all the tags are where they should be, no more nested in <span> tags (which I now call "<spam>" tags…), etc.

Normally I would uninstall/reinstall, but was thrown off by CC telling me it was up to date. Moving forward, when anything is acting wonky, I'll do that first.

@Frans v.d. Geest thanks for your help!

Amal.

Community Manager

Hi @Mimi-MTC

Hope you are doing well.

We are happy to hear that you got the issue fixed. Our request would be to try out the new Acrobat interface. If you experience problems with tools, features, or functionalities, please share your questions with us. We will be happy to provide helpful resources and answers to your questions.

We will follow up with a detailed community-featured post, guiding you to familiarise yourself with the new interface and regular updates on upcoming changes.

Regards

Amal

Frans v.d. Geest

Community Expert

Hi @Mimi-MTC

Hope you are doing well.

We are happy to hear that you got the issue fixed. Our request would be to try out the new Acrobat interface. If you experience problems with tools, features, or functionalities, please share your questions with us. We will be happy to provide helpful resources and answers to your questions.

By @Amal.

Oh for the love of... Give it up! Throw the towel in the ring man! Use your resources to fix bugs, build in PDF 2 support or anything except an interface NOBODY(!) seems to want... 😖

Frans v.d. Geest

Community Expert

Oh my gosh, the recent update to Acrobat Pro has destroyed the accessibility tools. Tagging is all messed up, and alt text and links don't always carry over from Word and PowerPoint.

By @Mimi-MTC

Messed up how? I have the very latest and this has fixed the Alt text Word bug in Altvtext fields.

The rest of the tools, like tagging with Reading order, work fine, as they used to...

So please can you give some information on what it is you see (or think) is 'messed up'?

And are you sure you are on the very, very latest version?

M

Mimi-MTCAuthor

Inspiring

I think so? My account auto-updates, and Creative Cloud is showing it as the latest version.

Files from Acrobat and Word, whether exporting as PDF or saving as PDF, are not seeing or tagging content, and autotagging isn't doing much better. My colleagues are work are struggling with this, too, and in googling for info, I was seeing complaints about it outside our PDF Accessibility group. I gave it a try with another doc that I had previously worked on without issues, and was encountering issues this time.

Still, reading your comment Frans, I'm realizing there's one thing I didn't try: uninstalling and reinstalling Acrobat. I'm going to do that and see what happens. I'll post here when I give that a try.

Fingers crossed!