Alt text missing on hyperlinks after "Export as Interactive PDF"

By @K-Ren

1. Is there a workaround or a solution so that the alt text appears on the Link tag? (From my knowledge, there hasn't been a solution (yet) within InDesign that will fix it)

No fixes in 2022 for Alt-text on these items. See our sandbox test file that's attached.

• External URLs
• External emails
• Internal hyperlinks/destinations
• Internal cross-references

And multi-line hyperlinks are still broken into multiple Link-OBJR sub-tags that are sequenced backwards.

2. a.) Is having the alt text on the Annotation enough (it passes my WCAG & PDF/UA testing, but is this good practice?) or should the Link tag have the alt text applied to it?

The PDF/UA Best Practices Syntax Guide does not specify on which tag the Alt-text should appear. https://www.pdfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/TaggedPDFBestPracticeGuideSyntax.pdf

In discerning the tea leaves' of Actual Text in the Syntax Guide, I would put Alt-text on the <Link> tag itself, not the Link-OBJR subtag (aka annotation). Remember, all standards are works in progress and this is one area that we standards-makers haven't yet finished. It's a long process!

But after all of this discussion, most SRs are not set to read Alt-text on anything other than <Figure> tags. Some users with advanced knowledge of their assistive technology (in other words, they have read the user manual or had training) can get it to work for some items. Right now, I'd estimate that 90% of SR users don't ever hear Alt-text on hyperlinks.

2. b.) If having the alt text on the Annotation tag is good enough to pass WCAG & PDF/UA, how does it sound to a screen-reader?
For example, does it still announce the content the same as if the alt text was on the Link tag?

Screen reader users never get to the content if it has Alt-text on it. Alt-text supercedes the content.

In our research, most SR users don't particularly like that: although they don't want to hear the content of a long, alphabet-soup URL and would rather have short descriptive Alt-text, they'd also like the choice to know the full URL when they need it (which often is critical when doing academic, research, or work-related reading).

Download free copies of JAWS and NVDA and start learning how to test these things. See our blog about testing with various assistive technologies at https://www.pubcom.com/blog/2019_04-05/checking-with-screenreaders.shtml

And finally, don't trust any of the automated checkers, including Adobe Acrobat's accessibility checker. They miss a lot of items, get many others wrong. And AI can't figure out what is acceptable, appropriate Alt-text: only a trained person can do that. Real testing uses both tools and humans.

Does it repeat the alt text if the link has 2 Link - OBJR (aka "Annotation") tags inside the Link tag because it's long and appears on 2 lines? 

Yes, they hear it twice and wonder what's wrong with us content creators.

We need to change their attitude and instead have them ask "what's wrong with Adobe?" Adobe InDesign is the only program I know that creates this double jumble of Link-OBJR junk.

—Bevi Chagnon

US Delegate to the ISO committees for PDF and PDF/UA standards, and member of the PDF Association.

Thank you, but no, it doesn't address the issue I'm having. I haven't changed how I've created my InDesign documents for accessibility, and I've always created my hyperlinks using the hyperlink panel. There's nothing else mentioned in the solved query that is relevant to the issues I'm having. 
I usually export to Interactive PDF, but I've also tried to export as print PDF with the tagged PDF options selected (which include Bookmarks, Hyperlinks, etc.) with the same result. I've attached an example PDF if that can help, but I think it's an issue that occurs when I export, whether it's a setting, preference or a bug.