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Re: Screen reader reading words as run-on

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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