The accessibility features, specifically regarding tagging documents, are unusable. My experience with Adobe is fairly limited and I have spent hours researching the process and attempting to add accessibility tags to documents with extremely limited success. I am often left feeling incredibly frustrated with a partially accessible document.

The auto-tag feature is incredibly hit-or-miss. I can retag a document four or five times, each time receiving different results. Sometimes my entire document is tagged as an image, sometimes every single line is tagged as a paragraph, sometimes paragraphs are tagged tables when they are simply two columns of adequately spaced text. It's very frustrating because I've spent a lot of time going through documents and changing fonts and spacings and such to make them Adobe-friendly.

When I finally get the document to a point where I only have to make a few edits, I open the Reading Order window and access the Show Order Panel. Both panels have been very glitchy. Sometimes they will freeze as soon as I open them, other times as soon as I make my first edit, and other times when I'm halfway through or even at the end of my edits. The tools for manually tagging have a mind of their own. They rarely work perfectly and usually make a bigger mess of my document. When I try to change the tag, from text to a figure for example, the tool will randomly select the entire document, do nothing at all, or merge with other tags around when I need the tags separate. After trying to delete tags/selected item structures (sometimes they don't even delete after I've selected the option off the menu), I am often left frustrated because parts of my document still are not adequately tagged.

I have repeatedly encountered problems trying to select figures, particularly donut charts and QR codes, to tag in the document. When I manually attempt to select and tag them, the tool will select the entire document or fail to even recognize that there is something there. And when I go to add alternate text to figures, sometimes it doesn't even appear as an option on the menu when I right click over the tag number (without selecting it first). On my most recent document, I added alternate text, changed something on the document, and the alternate text was reattributed to another figure.

Every time I finally get my document to a point where I think I'm done (and I've learned to save after literally every change because I cannot figure how to undo my most recent change and I expect the application to freeze at any moment), something inevitably goes wrong.

Take today for example: I exported a PDF from another platform (I've learned from past mistakes and used compatible fonts and everything) and uploaded it to Acrobat. This is a one-page flyer with a large heading, some subheadings, a few paragraphs, a few lines of font, and some graphics--three donut charts and a QR code. After auto-tagging, manually tagging, re-auto-tagging and manually tagging the document for 15-20 minutes (because the add tag feature would not recognize various pieces of text and several of my charts), I decided to save and be done with the document, even though one donut cart was not tagged, the QR code was tagged inadequately, and several separate lines of text were grouped into a single block despite trying for nearly 5 minutes to tag them separately. I pressed save and suddenly, many of the tags in the document were magically duplicated and the original tags were reordered. Hoping the document had saved before the additional tags were recognized, I closed out of the program without saving. However, when I opened Acrobat again, the extra tags were still there. So I tried to manually delete them. But the tags will not delete no matter how many times I right click and press "delete selected structure". Take a look at the screen shot. Tags 1 and 13 are duplicated. Also, if you look at the tags in the Order panel, they're nonsensical (part of auto-tag). I'm not an expert in this process, so I'm unsure how this will impact screen readers when someone attempts to use the accessible features of this document. Will it read out tag 2 as "mental mental mental mental mental mental" instead of "Mental health statistics?" (which, unrelated but important: I do not know how to test the tagging/screen reading features of the document despite extensive research.)

I'm frustrated. I have seven more documents to tag today and I'm ready to throw my computer across the room. I made this account specifically to share this feedback on this forum because after months of trying and reporting every time Adobe crashes when I try to tag a document (which was very frequent the first few times I used Acrobat, but hasn't happened recently), it's clear nothing has changed.

This is a key feature for producing documents. Adding accessibility features to a one paged document with minimal text and graphics should take, at the very most, five minutes. In the past, I have spent over an hour on a single document and have not been fully satisfied with my results. The forums and informational guides from Adobe are not very helpful. I have the newest version of Adobe that my company allows and have updated before my most recent attempt to tag a document. Something needs to change.