Bug: Acrobat Read Out Loud does not support documents with true typographic characters

[L Gryfe]

I am trying to prepare accessible documents from InDesign (and MS Word) and I have discovered that Acrobat Reader XI and Acrobat Professional X can not read documents that contain true typographic characters such as proper quotation marks, apostrophes, ellipses, and dashes. If I replace the quotation marks with primes (the quotation marks that don't curl), the ellipses with three periods, and the dashes with hyphens, everything reads fine. I do not wish to compromise the quality of the typography in my documents. Does anybody know if Adobe plans to fix this?

[a_C_student]

As long as the characters map to Unicode, there should be no issues from an accessibility standpoint. Read Out Loud is not considered "real" assistive technology, and is not suitable for accessibility testing. Better choices include a screen reader such as JAWS or NVDA, and/or a screen reader emulator such as Callas pdfGoHTML, VIP, or PAC 2. All except JAWS are free, and PAC 2 also includes an excellent accessibility checker (much more thorough than the one built into Acrobat).

[L Gryfe]

Thanks C. I think I tried another reader and I think it was okay. But even if Acrobat isn't "real" assistive technology - and I accept your point - I still consider this a fairly serious shortcoming of the program. If it offers the opportunity to do even a preliminary review of the accessibility of the document, it should at least be able to read it.

Thx

LG

[AlexBerryLibrary]

Hello a C student, L Gryfe, the problem with Acrobat's Read Aloud function seems to be specific to the Mac at the moment. Although my pdf generated from Indesign CC 2017 will not read on my Mac, when I open it on a PC in Adobe Reader, it does read aloud.

So the question is, how does a Mac user prepare a pdf document generated from an InDesign CC 2017 file so that screen readers read it in the correct order, if Adobe Acrobat is on the blink?