PDF actual text does not get read by screen reade

[jakob_diversa]

PDF actual text does not get read by screen reader

Hi all

I am currently working on an accessibility remediation of a time table for a public transportation company.
I ran into an issue where the Jaws screen reader does not read information given through the “actual text” feature in Adobe Acrobat. However it works perfectly fine with the NVDA screen reader.
I have a table cell with a Em dash symbole “-“ indication there is no bus at that specific time. Rather than just reading the “-“ I want the screen reader to give a more informative text. I have tried accomplishing this by adding the “actual text” to:
• The data cell tag
• A span tag inside the data cell tag which again contains the “-“ symbol
• The “-“ symbol itself.
None of the above works. Jaws just reads the cell as “blank”. Yet NVDA reads the intended text in all of the above versions.
I also tried adding text in the “alternative text” field rather than in the “actual text” field but again Jaws does not read it.
However when applying the information in the “actual text” field to tags e.g. a heading outside of the table Jaws does actually read the intended text from the “actual text” field.

I tested this with Jaws 2018 and Jaws 2019 with same result.

Any ideas on how to add information inside the data cell that Jaws will actually read are very appreciated.

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

This is an error with JAWS.

Not your problem.

Lodge a complaint with Freedom Scientific re: this serious shortcoming. They should have fixed this years ago. https://www.freedomscientific.com/

[jakob_diversa]

ok i will do that, but do you know of any solution to my problem??

[maxwithdax]

We have anchored a graphic inside the table cell and applied alt text to it to get around this issue. You might give that a try. 

- Dax

[maxwithdax]

Also, When I am setting alt and actual text for JAWS, I have to save, then close the document and open it back up again for JAWS to recognize the new alt/actual text. I know it sounds basic, but have you tried setting your text then closing and re-opening the document? JAWS seems to need to reprocess the file to recognize my newly set text.

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

Dax wrote: "Also, When I am setting alt and actual text for JAWS, I have to save, then close the document and open it back up again for JAWS to recognize the new alt/actual text."

Yes, that's very common for a lot of features in Acrobat and not just for JAWS and Alt-Text.

So build into your SOP (standard operating procedures" to do occassional "save"/"save as" to make sure everthing gets set into the file.