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Re: PDFs that read one word per line

for

From: Jason Megginson
Date: Jan 26, 2010 7:15AM


Hello Everett,

The PDF document you offer is not tagged and structured. Acrobat will
infer reading order when a screen reader is active on an untagged
document. If you tag the document with Acrobat Professional you'll notice
better results. I tagged this document with the Automatic tag feature in
Acrobat 9 Professional and JAWS read entire lines with the virtual cursor.


The amount of words announced by JAWS can also be set in the Configuration
Manager (HTML Options) and Verbosity settings. So depending on user
settings, the amount of text read on a tagged PDF document may vary.

If sentences within one paragraph are tagged with multiple paragraph
elements, this may also affect the way JAWS reads the information. Rather
than reading the entire line, JAWS may stop at the end of the sentence.

Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of E.J. Zufelt
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 8:29 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] PDFs that read one word per line

Good morning,

Once in a while I run across a PDF that reads with JAWS one word per
line (example URL below). Even when saving the PDF as text the
content is saved one word per line. Can anyone tell me if there is a
common structural error that people are making with these documents,
and if so what it might be?

Example PDF document that reads and saves one word per line:
http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/pdfs/board/10jan18/12.pdf

Thanks,
Everett

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