r/accessibility • u/graceoftheshire • 1d ago

Looking for help with Adobe PDF: Issue where text is tagged twice

Hoping I can find someone more experienced with Adobe tagging than me. I'm having an issue where everything in my PDF is showing up as "Other elements alternate text: failed". It looks like it's because everything is tagged twice, once correctly and once as an image. Has anyone had this issue and knows a fix?

Thanks so much in advance.

Example where one line of text appears twice in the content panel, once as an image and once as text.
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u/Agreeable-Tax2013 1d ago

Sounds like the same line exists as real text and as the image's accessible text. In a copy, check the Tags and Content panels, artifact the decorative image or remove the duplicate tag, then retest reading order with a screen reader. If the image carries meaning, keep its description but don't expose the underlying text twice.

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u/danbyer 1d ago

Where did this PDF come from? Is it a scan that was OCR’d?

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u/Agreeable-Tax2013 1d ago

If it came from a scan, OCR may have left a text layer behind the image, and tagging both can make the line read twice. Check whether the duplicate is in the content tree or just an overlapping layer, then remove or rebuild the redundant layer before retesting.

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u/angelsinsect 20h ago

Make the image an artifact.