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Adobe Acrobat accessibility problem with PDF on reflow

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From: Carmen Mardiros
Date: May 12, 2004 3:04AM

Hello,

I have been trying for 3 weeks to make a PDF document accessible and the problem I can't seem to get past is the logical order of the document being messed up. Ok so the document doesn't have multiple columns, forms etc but it does have special styles used for headings, bullets etc. It also has a header and footer (logo in the header, copyright in the footer).

On conversion to PDF using Acrobat 6.0 some pages reflow properly while on others it either reads:

word179 word289 word246 (in no particular order, no last or first word in a paragraph) and then the rest of the page as a block. Using TouchUp Text reveals that the whole page is one big block of text which JAWS just skips over.

On other pages parts of the copyright get placed first, then some words, then the rest of the page.

Looking at what the document looks like in Word XP I can't for the life of me understand what is causing it, I haven't used line breaks or anything that could cause it.

Please help, it's driving me insane!

Carmen