Adding a hyperlinked text frame to tag order for accessibility

[Janelle31020627ktet]

I make a newsletter in which I hyperlink all text boxes and images for easy clickablity by our readers (we don't want people to have to navigate to a line of text to click on the link, we want the entire field to be clickable). The images are purely decorative, so I've made them into artifacts.

For people who must use screen readers though, these hyperlinks don't export in our as a part of the tag (tab?) order. I cannot find a way to tag these text boxes as hyperlinks to have them export as a part of our tags.

I have two main questions:

1.  Is there any way to export these text boxes to be tagged to export a <link> OBJR into the tags in Adobe Acrobat? I have tried:

• tagging the text box as "root". This doesn't show up in Acrobrat.
• creating a new tag called "story" where I tag it as a hyperlink style. This doesn't show up in Acrobrat.
• adding "object export options" and writing alt text for the text box. This doesn't show up in Acrobrat.
• making the text boxes into artifacts. This completely removes the text from the tag list, so this is not a viable option.
• hyperlinking the whole blurb of text. This outputs an OBJR for each line, which I imagine would be frustrating for someone using a screen reader.

2. If I can't link the text frames I have two ideas for work-arounds, but neither solves the problem Adobe Acrobat's accessibility check outputting an error. I have two questions related to this:

• If I do a work-around, is it a problem if Adobe fails an accessibility check if I know that what I have provided is not exactly the same, but provides the same information? 
• Will these text boxes not being tagged show some type of error with a screen reader, or will they just not show up at all?

[Mike Witherell]

Why do this at all? You state they are decorative artifacts, which means that a screen reader assist device would ignore them. Accessibility is for people who cannot see. They must derive the content by a device reading to them. You are mixing in something that a sighted person would do: See an object and click on it.

If you feel you must do this, did you try making the box a graphics frame with hyperlink and testing the export tagging for that?