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Re: Jaws not opening links

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From: Steve Green
Date: Oct 17, 2021 6:31AM

Thanks David, however the <EMAIL REMOVED> email address does not work anymore. The person I spoke to on the Microsoft Disability Answer Desk was not even aware that they had ever had an email address.

Having spent 2 hours on the phone with them and having done many hours more testing, all the evidence shows that the problem is with Adobe Reader, not Windows. I suspect that we were misled by Adobe Reader silently updating at around the same time as the recent Windows update.

On the machines I have access to, the issues occur with the latest version of Adobe Reader (2021.007.20099) regardless of the Windows version.

The issues do not occur on a machine with Adobe Reader 2021.007.20091 and Adobe Acrobat 2021.007.20095 with the latest version of Windows (21H1 OS Build 19043. 1288) and an earlier build (21H1 OS Build 19043. 1201).

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any way to obtain recent versions of Adobe Reader. They do have an FTP site at ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/AcrobatDC/, but there are a couple of gotchas:

1. Chrome and Firefox no longer support FTP, so I had to use Internet Explorer! You might be able to use an FTP client, but WS_FTP 12 wouldn't connect because it insisted I enter a username and password, even though neither is required.

2. The most recent version of Adobe Reader I could find was dated 28 October 2020. I uninstalled the latest version and installed this one, and JAWS now works properly with PDFs again. It's not ideal to be using such an old version, but it's good enough to allow us to continue testing PDFs until Adobe release a fix.

If anyone knows how to obtain a more recent version of Adobe reader, please let me know.

Steve