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Re: More info about Screen reader reading words as run-on

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From: David Farough
Date: May 6, 2022 6:49AM

This is interesting!
Perhaps some of the variability in results with Jaws and NVDA could be explained by the speech synthesizer in use.
So many different possibilities here.

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Alan Zaitchik
Sent: Friday, May 6, 2022 8:34 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [WebAIM] More info about Screen reader reading words as run-on

More data about this:
In PAC3's Logical Structure display I see the words separated by spaces. In its Screen Reader Preview I see the words joined together without spaces.
Retesting with both JAWS and NVDA I hear no problems with the read out, even after slowing down the rate of speech to the slowest possible, for many instances of the putative problem— but I have no reason to believe this is always the case. Other users have reported the problem with NVDA, and I myself heard it last week with both NVDA and JAWS— although I cannot find the exact location in the document to retest. Note, too, that the document is created by a third party vendor using PDFLib and Java, not through manual editing. We're trying to Gert them to look at the issue, if course, but I would like to have more information for them.
THUS: Is there uneasy way to see the encoding of specific white space characters in the document?
Thank you,
Alan
By the way, all the above testing was with the latest or very recent releases of NVDA and JAWS (2021, 2022) and Acrobat DC.

> On May 2, 2022, at 6:51 PM, 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