WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Acrobat instability when using screenreaders

for

From: Roger Kowallis
Date: Jun 22, 2010 4:45PM

Hi There,

I've had problems with Acrobat instability when accessing PDF files while using screen readers such as JAWS and NVDA. These files were created using MS Word 2007 and converted to PDFs with the Acrobat PDFMaker plugin for Word. Some of the files also had form elements added in Acrobat Pro 9. The documents read correctly when using Acrobat's internal Read Out Loud functionality and they also show no errors when running Acrobat's Full Accessibility check. The problem appears when accessed while using screen readers - Acrobat becomes sluggish and unstable causing the application to eventually lock up. I've tried processing and testing the documents on different machines but I'll still having the same issues.

Here's a link to one of the files: http://cmstest1.test.utah.edu/sample.pdf

Any Idea what might be causing the problem??

Thanks.