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Re: Help! Inadvertently checked "Tag Annotations" inright-click menu

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From: Steve Green
Date: Jan 25, 2023 12:22AM

What you are describing is a native Adobe Reader feature that you cannot control. It automatically makes text clickable if it has either of the following structures:

[anything]://[anything]
www.[anything]

In the latter case, it adds the protocol http:// to the link, not https://.

It does not alter the annotations or tags, so the links are not in the focus order and they are not accessible to assistive technologies. It's just a feature that Adobe thought would be useful to some people.

The behaviour is different in other PDF reader applications. For instance, Firefox and VIP PDF Reader do not create any links. Chrome does create links, but it uses slightly different rules:

[http or https]://[anything]
www.[anything]

The only way to prevent Adobe Reader and Chrome from creating links automatically is to use URLs that don't match those structures. I can't think of any nice way to do that, so you would probably need to resort to a nasty hack like adding a very narrow space after the colon. I don't think that would cause any problems for assistive technologies when reading the link, but you would need to test it.

That said, I don't like doing hacks like that, so when I had the same problem I just told the client the reason and said there is nothing we can do.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd