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Re: PDF line breaks and reading flow with screen readers

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From: Karlen Communications
Date: Jul 7, 2016 6:32AM

I suspect this is a mistagged PDF. The only time I get the pauses at the end of lines in a paragraph are when each line is tagged as a separate paragraph. The screen reader or TTS tools think it is a paragraph and pause accordingly.

Cheers, Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Olaf Drümmer
Sent: July 7, 2016 8:14 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] PDF line breaks and reading flow with screenreaders

Hi Gijs,

despite the fact that I am not extremely knowledgeable when it comes to screen readers I do know from my use of NVDA that it is not true it has to stop at the end of every line.

Regardless: there is nothing in a properly tagged PDF that indicates to screen readers - or any assistive technology for that matter - to stop at the end of every line. So if anything needs fixing, it looks like the fixing has to happen on the side of the screen reader that is showing this behavior. That much said, I also do know that a lot of the behavior of screen readers goes back to how they are configured. It might be possible to configure at least some of the screen readers such that they do not stop at the end of lines.

Olaf


> On 07.07.2016, at 13:13, Gijs Veyfeyken < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Screenreaders (NVDA, Jaws) add a stop after every visual line of text in a properly tagged PDF.
> In InDesign, the width of the text frame determines the visual width of the lines and therefore the breaks.
> But semantically (tag-wise), it's one paragraph. The stops are confusing and break the flow while reading.
> Is there anyway to avoid this as an author of a PDF in InDesign? Or is this up to the screenreader, should I file a bug of feature request?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Gijs
>
> ---
> Gijs Veyfeyken
> AnySurfer - towards an accessible internet http://www.anysurfer.be/en
> Brussels - Belgium > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
>