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Re: recommended settings for the PDF Testing :

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Nov 30, 2023 3:24AM

You should only see that dialog if the PDF is not tagged, in which case I don't test it and I tell the client they need to supply a tagged version (or pay us to tag it).

If the PDF is tagged, the Tags panel defines the reading order and semantics. You can access the Reading Order dialog via the main menu, but there is no reason to do so. If the reading order isn't correct with the recommended setting, you need to fix the Tags panel. If a user chooses a non-recommended setting, you have no responsibility for the resulting behaviour.

There is one setting I sometimes change, which is the number of pages above which Adobe Reader considers the document to be "large". This is relevant because screen readers read the entire document if it contains fewer pages. They only read a single page if the document contains more pages. I believe this is done because large documents cause a lag in the screen reader behaviour. That makes sense from a user perspective, but as a tester you usually need to test the document as a whole, if possible. The default setting is 50 pages, but you can set it to several hundred as long as you are testing on a powerful machine.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd