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Can you remove link underlines and focus indicators in PDF documents?

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Feb 13, 2025 10:00AM

Hey y'all

Probably a couple of silly questions, but I want to make sure.
I'm trying to translate an easy manual accessibility checklist from web to
PDF.
One requirement is to make sure all interactive elements have a focus
indicator. You can easily remove that in a browser but I don't know if it
needs to be tested in a PDF document (can the document authors somehow
remove the focus outline?)

The other check is to make sure that links in a block of text are
underlined. Again, can the author of a PDF document do things like removing
default underlines from links or bookmarks?

Thanks for any insights you might have. I don't want to remove easy checks
but I also don't want to waste people's time on something that is a near
impossibility to happen.

Cheers
-Birkir


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