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Re: Acrobat instability when using screenreaders

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From: Priti Rohra
Date: Jun 25, 2010 8:51AM

Hi Roger,

Even I observed sluggish behavior of JAWS to a limited extent while
accessing the referred file however, it didn't lock up the file for me. JAWS
responded slowly but I managed to read the file completely. I know that file
needs to be tagged correctly but to read the information you can try to set
Adobe to read single page at a time by selecting the option "Only read the
currently visible pages" available under the "Page vs. Document" drop-down
field.

The above option is found under the Reading option of the Preferences dialog
box found under the Edit menu of Adobe Reader. This will instruct screen
reader to read one page at a time and is helpful for navigating faster using
screen readers in PDF documents including forms.

Note: I am using Adobe Reader 9 with JAWS 9.

Hope this helps!

If you need any further assistance with regards to tagging the file, you can
write to us offline and we'll be happy to help.

Thanks & Regards,
Priti Rohra
Senior Accessibility Consultant
Net Systems Informatics (India) Pvt. Ltd. & BarrierBreak Technologies
Web: www.n-syst.com | www.barrierbreak.com
Blog: www.barrierbreak.com/blog

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Roger Kowallis" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2010 3:15 AM
Subject: [WebAIM] Acrobat instability when using screenreaders


> 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.
>
>