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Re: Acrobat Read Out Loud mistakenly reads letter as Roman Numeral

for

From: Julie Romanowski
Date: Jul 17, 2014 1:03PM

Of course Read Out Loud shouldn't be used as a substitute for screen reader testing. It's a text-to-speech tool, not a screen reader. However, that doesn't mean it can't be a valuable tool. There are people in my organization with various cognitive disabilities who use text-to-speech software to help better understand information presented in documentation. TextAloud is the text-to-speech software we provide to our employees who need this type of accommodation. However, many of them use Read Out Loud when reading PDFs, as it does a better job in identifying text correctly. For example, Read Out Loud will read Roman Numerals as numbers while TextAloud doesn't.

On a side note, I can't replicate the issue Jordan mentioned. I've tested several different ways, and Read Out Loud always reads the D in "Medicare Part D" as "D".

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Karlen Communications
Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2014 12:32 PM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Acrobat Read Out Loud mistakenly reads letter as Roman Numeral

This is exactly why we do not recommend using Read Out Loud in Acrobat or
Reader and have been asking Adobe to remove it from both applications since
it was added. It is a less than bare bones "here is an example of what text
to speech might sound like" and is NOT a substitute for "real" TTS or screen
reading technology.

Never validate using Read Out Loud.

Cheers, Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jordan Wilson
Sent: July 17, 2014 1:02 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] Acrobat Read Out Loud mistakenly reads letter as Roman
Numeral

Normally when we see this topic its the opposite, a writer is trying to get
letters to be read as Roman Numerals instead of letters. VII instead of
Seven.

I'm running into the opposite - Acrobat's Read Out Loud mistakenly reads my
letter as a Roman Numeral

If you put the text: "Medicare Part D" into a PDF and let Acrobat read it
aloud using its built in Read Out Loud feature, the D is pronounced '500'
as if it was the Roman Numeral D.

Its important to note that if you view the same PDF in NVDA or JAWS it is
read correctly as D. So the issue here is (probably) only with Acrobat's
Read Out Loud functionality.

My question is how important is this? Can I assume that users will be using
a viable screenreader? Is there anything I can do about it?

_

Jordan Wilson

<EMAIL REMOVED>
Associate Director, Creative Technology

messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>