The outcome, of course, would be (a hard-to-read) yellow text on a pink background. Specifically, if the original colours were, say, black text on a pink background, and if a user set his or her preferences to yellow text on a black background, Acrobat or Reader would convert the text colour to yellow as required, but would not recognise the background correctly and so leave its colour unchanged. Previously, when users customised foreground/background colours in PDFs (via Edit, Preferences, Accessibility, Replace Document Colors), any section of a page with a background colour that covered less than half the total page area was likely to cause problems. Recently Adobe released an update for Acrobat Professional and Adobe Reader (version 11.0.10) that fixes a long-standing accessibility problem with background colours in PDFs.

Other than this update, the following post remains unedited. (It is, as of this writing, ‘un-fixed’.) Hence it is probably safe to aasume that this problem is ongoing and the workaround described below remains as relevant as ever. The problem referred to below has been fixed and then ‘un-fixed’ in successive versions of Acrobat Reader/Pro over the years.

Change pdf background color