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Re: Screen reader reading words as run-on

for

From: Karen McCall
Date: May 3, 2022 3:48AM

One serious note about too much Actual Text attribute!

If you are using a Text-to-Speech tool, such as Read&Write, you will need to switch from the regular reading in PDF to using "Screenshot" reader. Also, for both screen readers and some Text-to-Speech tools with the ability to highlight as you read, you lose the ability to have the text highlighted. This is an accessibility barrier for those that combine Text-to-Speech or screen reading with screen magnification.

The Actual Text attribute does not let you add semantic structure such as headings, lists, tables and so forth.

The better solution is to run the PDF through an OCR program like ABBYY Fine Reader or OmniPage Pro and fix the spacing. Most of the time, with the newer versions of Fine Reader, just opening the PDF in Fine Reader and letting it automatically "figure it out" removes this problem and you can now tag a PDF from Fine Reader although you still have to do some touch up with the result, people can at least read the PDF without using an attribute for most of the text.

Cheers, Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Vaibhav Saraf
Sent: Monday, May 2, 2022 7:27 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Screen reader reading words as run-on

Hi Alan,

I have observed this quite often as a user particularly with PDFs designed in Indesign. Technically this isn't a fault that can be caught by the automated checkers to what I know.

If you are asking from a remediation point then you would need to use the "actual text" property to make this work. I remember telling this to one of my contacts, it was hard to find for them, but ultimately it worked out.

Thanks,
Vaibhav



On Mon, 2 May 2022 at 18:51, Alan Zaitchik < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Listening to a pdf document using nvda (and then jaws) i hear certain
> words as "run on", e.g. the words "in each" are pronounced as if they
> were one word "ineach", pronounced as "in-e-ack". (Jaws handles this
> example ok but runs on other words.) Looking at the content panel in
> Acrobat it seems that the words are discrete with white space between
> them. Neither Acrobat nor PAC3 complain about a missing unicode mapping or anything else.
> Any suggestions?
> Thanks,
> Alan
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