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.

If we create a tagged PDF from InDesign, the contents item for hyperlinks is missing. This can be fixed with Acrobats single preflight fix: Create Contents Item For Link Annotations.

However, this broke already in 2019 and still is broken in 2020!
In 2018 it works in one go.

In 2019 and 2020 we have to run it is many as five times before it is actualy applied!

We save the document each time under a different name, sometimes the third time we run the fix it sticks, sometimes after five times, sometimes not at all.

Now we heard this from our many clients (councels, government agencies) as well. They all roled back to 2018 with our support, as roling back is not easy as it can not be done from the CC app.

Testing again in 2018 and it works fine.

Updating again to 2020 and it is broken.
We now use Callas PDF Toolbox v9 to fix it

This is very, very BAD as it prevents creatinf fully Matterhorn compliant Accessible PDF’s.

I am encountering problems with poorly labeled controls in the Acrobat DC Action Wizard. As a blind screen reader user, I would greatly appreciate anything you can do to improve the control labels that are spoken by screen readers. I am using the JAWS 2020 screen reader with Acrobat DC version 20.006.20042.
The issues I have encountered:

1. Some of the button control labels are unclear and it is difficult to determine which control has focus. For example, when adding a Watermark, the button to add the watermark is spoken as “Add”. If I press “space” to select this option, another button appears, spoken as” Add”. I must tab to this second “Add” button and press enter to set watermark options.




2. I do not see a clear way to determine which control has focus when rearranging the sequence of actions. None of the buttons say “Selected” to let the user know which option is highlighted and will be modified by the “Move Up”, “Move Down”, or “Remove” from sequence buttons.




3. If using the NVDA or Windows Narrator screen reader, none of the options in the Action Wizard seem to read. These options due seem to be spoken in JAWS.




4. When trying to run an action, focus is automatically placed on the “Select a File” button. When I attempt to tab from the “Select a File” button to the “Start” Button, to launch my action, Acrobat DC crashes and completely closes. The only work around I have found is to not use keyboard navigation and instead use the mouse emulation options in JAWS to find and activate the start action button.

I don’t know if I have explained these issues clearly enough for you to reproduce. I need to use Acrobat DC in my work and would greatly appreciate if these issues could be resolved. Any assistance you can provide is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Peter

I'm having an accessibility issue that may be a bug with Acrobat or InDesign, or a combination of both. I have a single page of show notes for a podcast. Paragraph styles are used, export tagging is set, and order is laid out in the articles pannel. Upon export and listening with the NVDA screen reader, the reading order is correct, but the bulleted list of links is just read as "bullet, bullet, bullet, etc." without the accompanying text, and the links are skipped. You can tab through the links, but instead of identifying the object as a link, and then giving the accompanying hyperlinked text, with each tab you just get, "link, link, link, link." I can post this in the InDesign uservoice as well, but I thought I'd start here. I experimented with a blank document in ID, and just created a bit of text and a hyperlink. Same issue. I have attached the exported PDF.