Adding Tooltip or PopUp Message to form

I have a related question: How can I turn off the mouse over pop up when you have tool tips and custom screen reader text and still have the information available to a visually impaired person using a screen reader? We are creating forms for the general public to use, and only a small percentage of those people are visually impaired. For the majority of the population, the mouse over pop ups are unnecessary since they can already read the field's caption or any surrounding text related to the field.

Actually, this may still be possible with Designer.



While I don't know exactly what you mean by "step-action tables" and don't know what AcroForm API calls you were using to do this in PDF Forms, you can most likely still do this in an XFA form
which is rendered to PDF (which implies that Acrobat is the only application which will host the form):



In any event on any XFA object, you have access to the following object:

event.target

In Acrobat, this happens to be the
Acrobat Document object which represents the form -- on the AcroForm layer.



From there, you should be able to use most of the AcroForm functions and properties you were used to using prior to switching to XFA forms.



While there are techniques you could use in Designer to build your own tooltip-like object which becomes visible only when the mouse hovers over an object on a form, there are currently some z-order bugs in Acrobat that'll prevent that sort of solution from working nicely (which is too bad because with this solution, you could've made really rich tooltips -- some even that change dynamically depending on the data loaded into a form!). For example, some fields are always drawn above other fields, regardless of their position in the XFA object hierarchy of a form, which means that your tooltip object would always be partially obstructed. Hopefully these bugs will be addressed in a future release of Acrobat.



In the mean time, if you can remember the script for your old AcroForm-based tooltips and your form is only ever hosted by Acrobat, then I suggest you stick with AcroForms to address this problem.



Stefan

Adobe Systems

I have an enhancement to this question. I have a form that is quite interactive. While tooltips are fine for easy descriptors, in a few cases I need some context-sensitive help. This help is more detailed and really should have some formatting (like step-action tables).



I remember with AcroForms, there was a way to display particular formatted PDF information within a PDF. Now, I'm sure this is not possible with Designer, but is there another solution or work-around?



Process:

User clicks an icon

Icon opens the help content for that area

User can click an area to close the help text



Thanks in advance for your ideas,

Lisa

I believe the intended result is a text field which is half-way between being totally editable and read-only.



In this case, you would specify the default value by using script like this on the field's Calculate event (in FormCalc):

"default text here"

Personally, if you're just wanting a tool tip on a field, I would stick to using the Accessibility palette as indicated earlier in this thread.



Stefan

Adobe Systems

What should the results be? This does nothing for me. Also, for the 'Calculated-User Can Override' seeting, how do you add a Default text value? I don't see this property when you select the Calculated option.

I have an easy alternative solution for this. May be you need to tweak a little bit.<br /><br />1. Add a TextField Object.<br />2. Set it to accept multiple lines and Appearance to 'None'<br />3. On the Object--Value tab select 'Calculated -User Can Override'<br /> and add the Default text value.<br />4. On the Layout pane set the caption position to 'None'<br />5. One Accessibility pane select Tool Tip and '<add your Tool Tip text>'<br />6. Select the text object and add the following code to it's events.<br /> enter: $.access = "protected"<br /> mouseEnter: $.access = "protected"<br /> mouseExit: $.access = "open"<br /> exit: $.access = "open"<br />7. Check the results.<br /><br />Good Luck,<br />SekharN<br />www.lawson.com

The decision not to support custom reader text and tool tip information on a text object is specific to PDF which renders text objects statically (basically like an image rather than text, even though Acrobat may let you select it with its Text Selection Tool).



XFA, on the other hand, doesn't target only PDF and print: It targets HTML via LiveCycle Forms and can target various other output formats (we just don't support formats other than PDF and print in Designer 7.1).



That's why you can still set tool tip and custom reader text on text objects in Designer even though they aren't supported in PDF (Acrobat).



Stefan

Adobe Systems

Stefan - Thank you! That certainly answers my latest post. Yes, I was indeed using a "Text" object instead of a "Text Field", which is why nothing was popping up. I didn't realize that "Text" didn't allow it (why does the accessibility tab show then?) I'll go back through and swap everything out with "Text Fields" and clear out the captions like you suggested. THANKS again!

Regardless of which property you use on the Accessibility palette, the text you enter will likely only show-up when the mouse is over the field's value area.



By default, the precedence is set for the Custom Screen Reader Text (by using the Screen Reader Precedence) which means that if you specify both a tooltip and custom text, the custom text will show instead of the tooltip text. To get the tooltip text to be used, set the Screen Reader Precedence property to
Tool Tip.



One thing comes to mind: You mentioned you tried to specify custom text on a "text box". Is the text box a "Text" object from the Library or is it a "Text Field" object? If it's a "Text" object, then I doubt anything will ever show-up because you can't set focus to a "Text" object in Acrobat and therefore, no tool tip or custom text will be displayed. If you want something that looks like a text box to have a tool tip, you could use a text field and remove its caption (using the Layout palette).



Stefan

Adobe Systems

stevex - Thank you! That's what I'm needing, where the message pops up. Only, I guess I should clarify further. It's not a text field that I'm using, just a regular, unmoveable text box that I would like to have a tool tip pop up. It's still not working for me....