Touch Up Reading Order tool causes text to dissappear

What's likely to be going on is that the Touch Up Reading Order Tool is (erroneously) reshuffling the "z-order" of the page content such that your text is being masked by another co-located graphic.

If this is the problem, it can be corrected in the Contents panel - find and move the text to fix the z-order. Be CAREFUL - there is no "undo" in the Contents panel!

I had the same problem ... and I think I might have figured it out. I've been working on this issue for a couple days & it's been really weird. One time I was able to make a headline stay visible, but then I had to try many more times before it happened again - to see what made it work in that one instance. ... I think I finally figured it out though - It seems like a bug.In the TouchUp Reading Order tool, if you move items UP or ABOVE a text-box with white text & a colored-background, the white text disappears and becomes invisible (although it's still there). ... BUT, I discovered that if you move everything DOWN or BELOW the item instead, the white text stays visible after the move.So instead of starting at the top of the page when TouchingUp the Reading Order, you can start at the bottom and it works properly. (It could be called the TouchDown Reading Order tool instead.) :-)

The inability to UNDO is pretty annoying too. Sometimes when items are physically close, it automatically groups them together - even if they're different tags and not supposed to go together. It's not so much fun to have to start all over again when something like that happens. ... hope this info helps. It had me stumped for awhile.

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I'm trying to learn how to make print PDF's accessible for the web. It seems kinda complicated to work backwards and try to separate the design from the content. (just my thoughts) It seems similar to CSS & HTML and we're just trying to get the HTML-like content out of a printed PDF piece where it's all lumped together. It would be ideal if we (designers) could link to a single Word document (that the writer/editor worked with, and had all the articles in proper reading order) from InDesign and be able to separate out all the headlines, subheads, paragraphs, etc. to be able to arrange them however we like. ... similar to how webpages can be built with basic header, navigation, body and footer-containers with content. It would be great if the writer/editor could put containers around articles and name headlines, subheads, paragraphs, etc, and then the designer could arrange those containers however they wanted to - even span a headline across two columns while the article stays in the two columns separately. As the designer/page-layout person though, we would need to be able to insert soft-returns where we wanted them kerning and such - that being more for design purposes than content purposes. There might be images that we would need to insert into the paragraphs that might be necessary content, and other images that would just be decoration or design elements (that would not need to be communicated to accessible viewers). It would be good to be able to name if an image is necessary content for the accessible or just design-related imagery.... I hope someone from Adobe reads this. (feel free to email me on this idea) It's just my thoughts. I know it would take quite a bit of work to get there - possibly working with Microsoft in developing a way to make containers & identify different elements in the documents - less style-formatting and more content-formatting/naming. I think this would make the process of going from print design PDF's to accessible PDF's for the web a whole lot easier ... and also more simple as compared to this crazy process of trying to go back and sort through hundreds/thousands of different components in a print design PDF and trying to name all the content and what order they're supposed to be in.Best.
-P

well, I found out that even if you move all the items BELOW and everything renders correctly - even if the order even appears correctly on the TouchUp Reading Order panel - it still does not fix the problem. the reading order is still out of order (when you check Reflow or try Read Out Loud) ... and the PDF file size is a lot bigger (>11Mb instead of <1Mb).I'm using Acrobat 7.1.0 on a Intel Mac OS X v10.4.11.
Anyone know if Adobe fixed this glitch in Acrobat 8.0 (or plan to with 9.0)?

Apparently it has still not been fixed in Acrobat X Pro. Thanks, Adobe. :p

I tried to move the order from bottom to top, and in doing so figured out how to get the text to be visible by leaving the Figure element on top (effectively making it the first order). For the current project, it's not a big deal conceptually, but I don't have access to the authoring document, so I can't make changes to see if it improves.

In the past when I've been able to use InDesign, I have arranged the image (Right Click image>Arrange>Send to back) in the background and it seems to work fine. If it still doesn't, then I have cut up the image so nothing overlaps.