I have tried different keyboard shortcuts and made sure I never use the same shortcut twice on a single slide. I tried switching to transparent text buttons rather than click boxes, which has seemed to make a little difference. I've tried both SWF and HTML5 publishing. I have tried showing and hiding the rectangle around objects in HTML5. As soon as I try to give people an option to advance to the next slide via a button or playbar controls, it stops working. In other words, if I have a 1-slide course, Captivate's accessibility works. I have been able to get the screen reader to read the text if I remove all interactive elements including the playbar and TOC. Once in a while I can get something to work, but not completely, or I can't repeat it. The accessibility functionality seems so flaky. According to the documentation, I shouldn't have to copy the text into the Accessibility Name for each object, although I have tried that in a few places without success. Many slides are just text plus a transparent text button to pause the screen, so mostly I need the screen reader to read the course content. However, most of the time, the screen reader isn't acknowledging any captions or smart shapes with text on the screen. The screen reader can access the playbar buttons and TOC fine, and it usually recognizes interactive elements on the screen. I've been testing with the screen reader Window-Eyes. I'm working in Cp 8 and trying to make a course fully Section 508 compatible.

Adobe reader accessibility