How to prevent texts from being read by a screen reader?

[Monomotor]

I'm working on a project for a PDF document that is also accessible to screen reader users. The document has a folio for some additional information such as the company and department names. I'm using an Artifact tag for the paragraph style as well as the object frame to prevent these texts from being read on every page, but apparently that's not enough.

I'm under the impression that the Artifact tag only works for images, not text. Is there any way to prevent texts from being read without necessarily turning them into curves or rasterizing them?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

What reader are you using? Many of the third-party ones are very erratic about following the more advanced document features, including accessibility tagging.

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[Monomotor]

The reading test is being done by a visual accessibility consultant using NVDA which, according to him, is the most used screen reader by Brazilian users (the audience of this project).

Apparently, using the Artifact tag for text works perfectly fine for Acrobat's Read Out Loud. My impression is that NVDA reads absolutely any element identified as text, regardless of the tag used.

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

Any reader that is not Acrobat Pro/Reader is almost certain to have variations in its document handling, usually "weaker" — not supporting upper-tier features (sometimes including such simple things as spreads and often including form and interactive elements).

Since you are working to a specific reader, it may be possible to find workarounds that conform to its function. Then again, it may simply lack the hooks for marking out text not to be read out.

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[Monomotor]

Thank you, @James Gifford—NitroPress. I'm working on a script to automatically convert all text in the folio to outline. I opened a new topic here: https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/unlock-page-items-that-come-from-master-pages/m-....

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Happy to have been useful. Even if my least favorite answers are "Oh, that doesn't work..." 😛

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[Monomotor]

I opened a specific topic about it on the NVDA GitHub Discussions' page, in case anyone wants to follow along: https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/discussions/14206