[NFBCS] Filling Out PDF Forms With Adobe Acrobat

[Steve Jacobson]

Curtis,

Is CONTROL-SHIFT-5 the same as the old CONTROL-K which I am still able to use?  I did not know why, but I also noticed that one has to infer reading order from document to have form fields read.  I also noticed that not all form fields, such as check boxes, are in the tab order.  I had to find them with the virtual cursor.  Is this new behavior?  I haven't done that many PDF forms so don't know if this is changed behavior or not.

Best regards,

Steve

From: NFBCS <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Curtis Chong via NFBCS
Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2023 3:59 PM
To: 'NFB in Computer Science Mailing List' <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Curtis Chong <chong.curtis at gmail.com>
Subject: [NFBCS] Filling Out PDF Forms With Adobe Acrobat

Greetings all:

I'd like to share a few tidbits I just picked up regarding the use of Adobe's free Acrobat software to fill out properly-constructed PDF forms.

In prior versions of the Adobe Reader, you could adjust your accessibility settings so that tags in documents would not be ignored. In this way, whenever you opened up a properly-constructed PDF form, JAWS would verbalize the form fields and even enable you to enter information.

In the latest version of Adobe Acrobat, this setting has disappeared. Thus, when I went to open up a PDF form document, JAWS could not detect the form fields.

(parenthetically speaking, some of you have have noticed that the traditional menus that we used to see in older versions of Adobe Acrobat have disappeared. The only menu left is the File Menu, which you can reach by pressing ALT+F after opening a PDF file._)

The solution is to open the PDF form document, press CTRL+SHIFT+5 to bring up the Reading Preferences dialog, and then to choose the "Infer reading order from document" option, which says it is the recommended choice.

Try as I might, I could not find anything written up about this anywhere.

Warm regards,

Curtis Chong, Treasurer
National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science


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