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RE: Using the accessibility features of Acrobat

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: May 31, 2006 2:40PM

Wayne,
Some responses:

> Problems with Authoring:
> 1) Acrobat added a some uninvited
> stuff to my MS Word menuand it takes
> more space than it is worth in my
> large print environment. How do I
> ditch that stuff?

You might want to keep it - the way to create tagged PDF is by using
that menu. The acrobat plugin for Word (PDFMaker) relies on Word's
Visual Basic to access the document structure. If you print a PDF using
the print menu you'll get an untagged document. You can, however, move
the menu using Word's customize toolbars option to put it as the last
menu to the right is that is helpful.

> 2) In Acrobat the menus don't conform
> to my Windows size preferences so I
> can see the items. Can they be
> enlarged?

I'm not getting the same result. Can you share what settings you are
changing?

> 3) The documentation is small and it
> doesn't come up in the regular player,
> so I can't make it big enough to see
> without horizantal scrolling. How can
> I fix that?

The documentation player does zoom, but creates a horizontal scroll bar.

> 4) I can't see the Preference menu.
> Is a screen manifier or reader the
> only option?

Some of the text in dialogs (including preferences) doesn't respond to
system font settings. Unfortunately, you may need to resort to a
magnifier or reader here.

> Problems with Browsing:
> 5) The Adobe reader voice is very
> slow! Can I speed it up?

There are settings in the "reading" section of the preference panel that
will allow you to adjust this (assuming that you can read the preference
panel, I know!).

> 6) I don't seem to be able to spread
> out the spacing between lines, letters
> and words on documents I pull off the
> web. For many partially sighted and
> dyslexic individuals this is very
> important. Is there a fix for this?

There is no way to modify only the spacing, but the reflow functionality
will adjust the spacing along with the font size.

> 7) Size and color control are very
> nice, but sometimes authors use fonts
> that are difficult at best to read.
> Can I re-style the fonts of
> reasonably structured documents?

This is not currently a feature. You may be able to address this in your
style guide.

Let me know about your settings and we can keep this conversation going
in a productive direction.
Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Accessibility Engineer
Adobe Systems
<EMAIL REMOVED>