WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

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

for

From: Laura Roberts
Date: Jan 25, 2023 8:08AM


This is in Adobe Acrobat not Reader. You can only get to the menu in
question by right-clicking on a tag in the tags panel.

I found that if "tag annotations" is unchecked while remediating, the links
remain cold. In other PDFs I remediated where I didn't accidentally click
that, the problem doesn't occur.

I have the feeling I'm going to have to redo a big chunk of this PDF...ugh

On Wed, Jan 25, 2023, 2:22 AM Steve Green < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:

> 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
> > > > >