Acrobat Reader for Mac does not expose an Accessibility Tree to VoiceOver

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Level 1

8 points

Acrobat Reader for Mac does not expose an Accessibility Tree to VoiceOver

Acrobat for Windows reads tagged PDF (aka PDF/UA) files and exposes an accessibility tree to assistive tech such as NVDA, Narrator, JAWS etc.

Acrobat for Mac does not do this. (And neither does Preview, or Safari). This means that the 'portable' document format is not accessible to Mac screen reader users at all. You can get the text nodes, but none of the semantic tags are respected.

Why is there such a discrepancy between accessibility support on the Mac vs. Windows versions of Acrobat Reader?

Mac Pro

Posted on Sep 3, 2020 3:40 AM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,590 points

Sep 3, 2020 4:14 AM in response to Matveyeyv

Apple's PDF Library (PDFKit) has no support for PDF/A, PDF/X, or PDF/UA standards, so no surprises that Apple applications do not provide PDF/UA support. Adobe is entirely responsible for what happens within Acrobat Reader DC, and you may need Adobe Acrobat Pro DC installed to fully expose the PDF/UA features with participating applications.

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Answer 2

dialabrain

Level 10

136,199 points

Sep 3, 2020 3:48 AM in response to Matveyeyv

Matveyeyv wrote:

Why is there such a discrepancy between accessibility support on the Mac vs. Windows versions of Acrobat Reader?

That would be a question best asked of Adobe.

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Acrobat Reader for Mac does not expose an Accessibility Tree to VoiceOver

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