This issue of InDesign and Acrobat incompatibility in regards to Acrobat displaying all spans even when the Reading Order is correct has been around for over two years. We deserve to know what Adobe is doing about it.

Acrobat Team acknowledges the problem and blames InDesign:

"It's actually not an Acrobat issue, it's an issue with InDesign and how it's generating the Content that Acrobat is displaying correctly"

https://forums.adobe.com/message/10005333#10005333

InDesign Team acknowledges the problem and blames Acrobat:

"You'd have to talk to the Acrobat team about why they display in the Tags panel the way they do." - Adobe
https://forums.adobe.com/message/10225230#10225230

OR

"Our investigation suggests that the issue lies in the latest update of Acrobat and there is little that can be done at our end to resolve the issue.
The problem has been communicated to the relevant team.
In the meanwhile we are closing this thread for InDesign."

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/33755254-accessible-pdf-exported-from-id-contains-spans-in

And closes the issue.

What is Adobe doing to fix this issue? And don’t tell us that it is not a real problem for screen readers because the Tags panel is ok. When a certain government agency reviews files, they just use the Reading Order Tool when they make complaints against people who use your product. These are not the kind of people who will read all these posts of Adobe blaming each other and then saying it does not matter because some screen readers don't use the reading order. Adobe is basically saying that this feature is pointless. If it is pointless remove it or merge it fully with the Tags panel.

Besides, there is a lot more assistive technology and applications than just JAWS and NVDA that depend on the reading order and reflow being correct.

What is Adobe doing to fix this span issue?

And don’t ask me for more info or more files. You have these posts with detailed explanations and you have already acknowledged the problem exists yourselves and acknowledged that you can reproduce it yourselves. And don’t tell us to go to Forums for help. Because they will send us back to UserVoice.

Thank you.

Feature Requests / Bug Reports for the Accessibility features in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC.

Adobe Acrobat Pro DC (Version 2018.011.20063) on Windows 7 Professional.

For the Tags panel:
1. Option to create Lists <L> tags with a set number of List Items <LI> tags instead of one at a time. Time wasted creating one at time.
2. Option to created tables <Tables> tags with a set number of Rows <TR> tags instead of one at a time. Time wasted creating one at time.
3. Stop forcing all the Tags folders to all be opened when opening a PDF file! Not efficient if having to reopen a PDF with an extensive Tags structure. These folders need to remain as they were when last saved!

For the Reading Order Popup menu:
1. Button to create List Items <LI> and List Body <LBody> for selected text. Currently have to manually change the tag for example <P> to <LBody>. Action Wizard is hit and miss with Lists, so I create from scratch many times.
2. Button to create Links <Link> for selected text and/or images with a popup box for enter the URL while simultaneously creating its Annotation in the Content panel and in the Tags panel. This would save time.
3. The Background/Artifact button doesn't work as it should. Items still go to the Tags panel.

For the Content panel:
1. Within the Page contents, the option to delete Annotations by selecting it and/or with a right click. This would save time.

For Adobe Acrobat Pro DC software updates:
1. Need a way to save my current customized layout so that when the software is updated, it is not lost. Time consuming to recreate with every software update. (iOS and PC).

Thank you,
terri@fusiononline.com

1. Brief Title

Losing german äüö (Umlauts) and letters in the Structure Tree when using "Add Tags to Document" in Adobe Acrobat DC (previous operation Number ADB-3207012-T1M7) German Language Problem?

1. Steps to reproduce the issue

Export a text document with german words that contain german umlauts (äöü), e.G.: "für, können, öfter, mögen" as a PDF without tags from InDesign or Word
Open the file in Acrobat DC
Go to "Tags" and open the little menu and choose "Add Tags to Document"
After the Structure Tree was created — save and close
when you open the document again in Acrobat DC and you can take a look at the tags in the Structure Tree and see that the letters are missing in the tags. Not only the umlauts but sometimes accompanying letters aswell
Examples: "für" -> "fr"; "können" -> "knen"
Conclusion: blind people can't read these anymore and the document is not accessible anymore!

The problem doesn't exist in Acrobat X and Acrobat XI.
The problem occurs with any font and all operating systems.
The problem was already documented with video and example-documents with the operation Number ADB-3207012-T1M7.

1. Operating system

The error occurs in all operating systems.

1. Expected results

Loss free texts in the Structure Tree with umlauts and all other letters so that the docment can be read by screen-readers.

1. Observed result

Missing letters in the Structure Tree after using "Add tags to Document" mainly in combination with Umlauts äöü and umlaut-ligatures.

When you have elements with no alt-text you get accessibility errors when running the checker. However, if you right click on the error and choose "fix" and walk through the items and mark them as decorative, instead of actually making them an artifact it simply changes the tag to "Artifact" which is not a valid tag and creates other errors. You then have to go in and properly designate the objects as Artifacts properly for the other errors to go away. VERY Frustrating. Come on Adobe Acrobat!

This is a repeatable condition and needs to be fixed immediately please!

Setting something as an artifact is a state and not a valid tag in the tags tree. Very frustrating that one tool designed to fix an issue actually creates other issues.

https://youtu.be/cLpXgisBgeg

Hyperlinks that span more than one line create multiple OBJR tags.
Reproduce: Create file in InDesign with links that span more than one line. Export to PDF/open with Acrobat. Find tag. Link will have two OBJR tags (or more if the link spans more than two lines). This is a bad experience for users of assistive technologies.
Sometimes manually fixing tags (deleting old links and creating new OBJR tag) isn't sufficient and designer has to resort to editing in the content pane or even using the Actual Text override to get the link to be read by assistive technology properly.
Please fix so that links that span multiple lines only have one tag.

I am a PhD student and have switched to Adobes pdf viewer because I think it is the best one (google and edge do not offer the same accessibility for mark up etc.) The one thing that I love about google and edge is that you can set them to open the previously viewed document. I read a lot of articles and use the tabs as a sort of reading to-do list. But when I close adobe (or my computer restarts) that list disappears, I have to either remember them or go to the recently opened files to open them again (but since sometimes I opened them a long time ago it is low on the list or has disappeared). It would huge if adobe could automatically open all files that were previously opened the last time I closed it. Thanks!

We noticed that your PDF viewer doesn't have AccSupp ActualText support. This means that copy-pasting technical text such as shellscripts and programming code, does not work in your PDF viewer and this greatly restrains the use of your whole program.

The replacement text is said to be supported, according to the file "Document management - Portable document format - Part 1: PDF 1.7" both on Table 323, page 559, and on section 14.9.4, page 615. Available here: https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/PDF32000_2008.pdf.

But according to the tests made using PDFs produced by pdflatex using the package accsupp, the replacement text support seems to be unreliable at the moment for copy and paste.

The tests are shown here: https://github.com/ho-tex/accsupp/issues/2
The tests generated various behaviors such as:
- Correct copy and paste of the text, but incorrect copy and paste of leading spaces and empty lines (Test 1);
- Unexpected insertions of spaces (Test 3 and Test 6), and;
- Spaces turned into newlines (Test 4).

We kindly request better support of the replacement text support, because the copy and paste directly from the PDF document is not reliable.

Please also refer to these two pages for further discussion:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/563803/how-make-a-latex-document-that-generates-a-pdf-from-which-copy-paste-works-corre

https://github.com/ho-tex/accsupp/issues/2