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

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From: Karen McCall
Date: Jan 25, 2023 3:57AM

There is a setting in Preferences called Create Links from URL's or web addresses...can't remember the exact wording.

It is the second check box in the General setting and I advise remediators to turn it off so that inaccessible links aren't created.

If you are remediating PDFs and keep this checked, it creates links that can't be seen when you go to Edit PDF, Links, Add or Edit Links. This means they also can't be edited/remediated.

Cheers, Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Steve Green
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2023 2:22 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Help! Inadvertently checked "Tag Annotations" in right-click menu

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


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Laura Roberts
Sent: 24 January 2023 23:18
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [WebAIM] Help! Inadvertently checked "Tag Annotations" in right-click menu

Hi,

In a PDF I was remediating, I inadvertently checked the "tag annotations"
in a tag right click menu. This causes Acrobat to assign annotations to URL's as they are created.

The PDF in question has some URL's that they do NOT want linked, since the links become outdated fairly often.

How to fix this?

I tried:
Edit PDF>Link>Add link - BUT there is no link to delete I tried right clicking on the URL text tag itself to see if any menu options appeared to remove the link, but there are none I checked the tags attributes, etc but I don't see anything there And as you all are probably aware - it's impossible to delete an annotation in the content panel.

Even though the link appears not to be present in the tag and edit menus - it the cursor still turns into a hand over it in the PDF and it is clickable.

Attached screenshot of right click menu and of a cold link that pops up the URL when it shouldn't - wasn't able to capture the cursor turning into hand, you'll have to take my word for it.

I cannot figure this out for the life of me!

Thanks,
Laura