Accessibility issues after update to v. 19

Report · Oct 10, 2018

Hi,

Adobe Acrobat Reader recently updated to version 19.008.20074 and screen readers (NVDA, Narrator) cannot read anymore the text under the mouse cursor when a PDF file is opened. Instead, the entire page is read no matter where the cursor is inside the document area. I reverted to 18.011.20063 and the screen readers work as expected. Did something important change in the accessibility support of Acrobat Reader in version 19? Is it possible to revert accessibility support to the previous version?

Thank you!

Report · Oct 10, 2018

Hello Iulsmen,

We're sorry for the trouble you had with Adobe Reader, Is it a Mac or Windows machine and what is the version?

Navigate to Adobe Reader's Preferences from Edit>Preferences>Security(Enhanced)>and uncheck these two options 'Enable Protected Mode at Startup' and 'Enable Enhanced Security'>Click OK and relaunch Adobe Reader and check.

Note: Disabling the Protected mode and Enhanced security is only for testing purpose, please enable it back.

Is it specific to one PDF or Read out Loud is not working with all the PDFs?

Let us know how it goes and share your observation.

Thanks,

Anand Sri.

Report · Oct 10, 2018

Hi AnandSri,

Thank you for the fast response. I'm using Windows 10 64-bit. The accessibility issue is not related to a specific PDF doc, it happens for many docs. For example, try this Screen Reader User's Guide by Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/accessibility/pdfs/accessing-pdf-sr.pdf

Open the document in Adobe Reader DC v.19, go to Contents on page 2, start Narrator and make the Narrator cursor follow the mouse cursor. If the mouse cursor indicates a Contents title ("Types of PDF Documents 10" for example), instead of reading that specific title, it reads the entire page in a strange order. You can observe this also from the blue rectangle shown by Narrator around the entire page, not only around the text under the cursor. This was not happening with Adobe Reader v.18. NVDA has the same behavior.

Later Edit: I checked the Accessibility settings and I had Reading Order set to Infer reading order from document, because some time ago I noted that this option had the best results for almost all documents. I changed this option to Tagged reading order and it fixed screen reading for the PDF mentioned in the link above. However, the issue still remains for PDFs without tags or with poor tagging. There are a lot such documents and the previous Reader version (18) handled it better. Can I configure Adobe Reader to use the accessibility support from v. 18?

Thanks again!