Accessibility and dynamic PDFs

[Former Community Member]

Hello there,

I am trying to get my dynamic PDF to be accessible to the Adobe Screen Reader. Here I have two problems. First, the screen reader is not recognizing non-textbox or button parts of the document and returning "clear" when I click them. Although I tagged them and gave them custom text. Can I make dynamic forms which have screen reader accessible text or image fields?

My second problem is a bit more urgent. As the PDF document, I generated, has buttons to add or remove parts of the document I needed it to be dynamic. And this works fine. However, if I let the screen reader, read the entire page of a document/document it loses the ability to add or substract parts. And when I turn off the screen reader function this stays like that. If I just turn on the screen reader an navigate through the document with the tab botton, I am still able to add or subtract parts and it reads the TextFields and Buttonforms well.

But why does letting the screen reader read the entire page disable the dynamic properties of the document? How do I stop this?

thank you all very much for any help!!!!

[jeanette614]

I also have to make sure that everything I make is ADA compliant and use Jaws read out loud software to test my documents. I noticed that there was a problem reading some documents especially dynamic pdfs. But a message box popped up while I was opening a dynamic pdf with Jaws running and it said "Adober Reader has detected that you may be using Assistive Technology on your computer.  While using Adobe Reader with Protected Mode enabled on Windows XP operating systems, some Assistive Technology may not be able to read some document content.  If you encournter problems, turning off Protected Modes may help.  This can be done by choosing Edit> Preferences > General and unchecking Enable Protected Mode at Startup." You will then have to close Adobe REader and restart it and then open your pdf again.

I would have never known to do this if I had not had my assistive technology software running at the time. Someone who uses this software regularly would know to turn that option off. But perhaps this is why Adober Reader is not functioning as it should for your document.

I  hope this helps.

[Former Community Member]

Thank you for the tip but it is still not working. But i didnt test it with any other speech program then just the simple adobe screen reader. maybe others would get it right. But that actually doesnt help me because i need it to work with the adobe one.

[Former Community Member]

In another forum i found this " tags are generated dynamically when the form is opened in Acrobat 8+ provided a screen reader application is already running. Otherwise, for performance reasons, accessibility tags are not generated.[/b] This is true for dynamic PDF forms. Static PDF forms are different in that tags are generated at save time rather than load (run) time". This would explain my first problem. I as i couldnt find out how to  get the screen reader running automatically with start up i opend another document after i started it in one. But the tags still were not generated.

[jeanette614]

That's interesting about the tags.  And that's probably why I was given that message about protected mode because I had JAWS operating at the time I was testing my dynamic form. Once I changed that option, it read my document perfectly.

In case you want to run your document with JAWS operating, you can download the program at Freedom Scientific and it's a fully functioning demo that will run for 40 minutes at a time. This would be a far better tool to test your documents with than the free Adobe Reader read out loud feature or accessibility checker. We don't even use those on LiveCycle documents. I test with JAWS.

I'm very interested in hearing any solutions that you find. I learn something new about LiveCycle every day and have come to appreciate what a powerful program it is.

[Former Community Member]

Hey Jeanette,

Thanks for the tip with the JAWS. The test version is pretty good! Just to let you know what happend at my side so far. I installed JAWS . Even though the document still was not tagged JAWS could recognize the text and picture parts. Which was cool but still not enough. So I installed acrobat pro and tried my best to create taggs. Didn`t work. In the end I had two versions of the same document. One static with tags and one dynamic without tags. So it is 100% clear that acrobat is not able to generate/include tags when the document is dynamic. Then, as you posted in your first post, I had the acrobat and JAWS running at the same time and all of a sudden the tags were generated on the dynamic form. And stayed there. But they are still not there if the acrobat pro or JAWS or both( i dont know which because both are not installed on my colleges lap top) are not installed. So you were right in your first post! 

Unfortunately i cant really change any tags in the acrobat pro, which i think is  because i only have the demo version so far. but i will get the full version and keep this post updated if i run into any problems or solutions i run into.

So thanks for your help!!

Best regards,

norbert

[jeanette614]

No, it's not because it's the demo version. I tried bringing my forms into Acrobat to tag them in the beginning because I was told by my Webmaster that the tags had to be there for the document to be accessible and it turned out just like you describe. It was impossible to tag my forms in Acrobat. So it seems to me that LiveCycle forms really can't be tagged in Acrobat Pro. I don't use Acrobat for anything more than Reader Enabling my forms and I always do that as my last step. LiveCycle forms work very well just as they are created. Once they are enabled, JAWS reads them just fine. If anyone knows of a different way, please let us both know.

> Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2011 02:27:43 -0600

From: forums@adobe.com

To: jeanetteeichhorn@hotmail.com

Subject: Accessibility and dynamic PDFs

Hey Jeanette,

Thanks for the tip with the JAWS. The test version is pretty good! Just to let you know what happend at my side so far. I installed JAWS . Even though the document still was not tagged JAWS could recognize the text and picture parts. Which was cool but still not enough. So I installed acrobat pro and tried my best to create taggs. Didn`t work. In the end I had two versions of the same document. One static with tags and one dynamic without tags. So it is 100% clear that acrobat is not able to generate/include tags when the document is dynamic. Then, as you posted in your first post, I had the acrobat and JAWS running at the same time and all of a sudden the tags were generated on the dynamic form. And stayed there. But they are still not there if the acrobat pro or JAWS or both( i dont know which because both are not installed on my colleges lap top) are not installed. So you were right in your first post!

Unfortunately i cant really change any tags in the acrobat pro, which i think is because i only have the demo version so far. but i will get the full version and keep this post updated if i run into any problems or solutions i run into.

So thanks for your help!!

Best regards,

norbert

>

[Former Community Member]

Are you sure it does not work with the full version of Acrobat Pro? I mean I see the tags with acrobat pro but i can not edit them by now. Are you sure that i will not be able to edit tags with the acrobat pro full version? because if you know that for sure i dont need to get the acrobat pro.

[jeanette614]

I can't answer that.  Maybe someone more familiar with Acrobat can tell you that. I just don't use Acrobat to tag any forms made with LiveCycle. LiveCycle generates it's own tags, from what I understand.

Sorry I can't help more. Good luck tho. I'll be watching to see if anyone has this answer.