I am a professional proofreader. My clients expect me to use the built-in annotation and commenting tools, and in the 2023 Acrobat interface I’ve come across several points of friction that literally double the amount of time it takes me to implement my markup.

1. I can no longer apply a tool after selecting text

In the old Acrobat, I could select text first and then look for the tool I wanted to apply to the selection. In the 2023 Acrobat, many tools are unavailable to me after I’ve already selected text. For example, if I haven’t activated the replace selected text tool before selecting text, navigating to that tool deselects my text.

After I’ve identified a proofing issue in the text I’m reading, I have to decide what I want to do with the text, select the correct tool to perform that action, and then go back to select the text that requires that action—a sequence that takes my attention away from the text that needs fixing and forces me to hold that information in my working memory while searching for the right tool. It is four mental steps instead of two, which means it takes me twice as long.

1. The new Acrobat forces me to use my mouse where I previously used my keyboard

With Comments open in the old Acrobat, if I started typing, the program would insert the text I typed. If I selected text and started typing, the program would replace the selection with what I typed. Intuitive, right?—functioning just like a word processor. Unless there’s a setting I can change to enable this feature, it seems I can no longer do this in the new Acrobat. I can still select text and delete it with my keyboard, but the program no longer recognizes any text I try to input.

It seems also from Adobe’s guide to keyboard shortcuts in Acrobat that there’s no keyboard-only way to select some of the more commonly used proofreading markup tools, including insert text and replace selected text. For proofreaders with print disabilities, who rely on the keyboard rather than the mouse to navigate a document, this change must be an accessibility nightmare.

The decreased keyboard functionality also means that when I’m trying to mark up text in a link, I can’t use my keyboard to navigate and select the text. Using the mouse activates the link, so in the past, I’ve clicked near a link, keyed over to the text I want to select and used the shift key to select the text. Now, instead of being able to directly mark up the change with keystrokes, I’m having to highlight the linked text and use a comment to explain the change, which is both more cumbersome for me and possibly less precise and clear to the designer inputting the changes.

1. The categorization of commenting and annotation tools is unintuitive

The annotation tools have now been subcategorized:

To access the insert text or replace selected text tools, you first have to click on the comment tool.Screen shot of the comment menu in Adobe Acrobat's new interface being selected. The options in the menu are "Add a comment," "Replace selected text," "Insert text," "Add text comment" and "Attach file"
To access the delete text (strikethrough) tool, you first have to click on the highlight tool (though, as I discussed above, this is less of an issue because strikethrough is also accessible through the pop-up and the delete key).
Not only does this categorization force the user to click twice to access a tool, but it also imposes an unnecessarily mental burden on the user to remember how these tools have been classified. To me, this classification is completely unintuitive: thematically, insert, replace, and delete text are related, and comment and highlight are related, but in the new interface they are not organized in that way.