Working with pdf documents on mac

By Zach, 14 November, 2026

Forum
Mac

Hello Applevis. I am a long time windows user and I've recently taken the plunge and gotten myself a macbook. I have been doing pretty well with most things, but I haven't yet discovered an app that does what I need with pdf documents.
I play a lot of tabletop rpg games which tend to come in pdf rulebooks. The accessibility of these documents is, let's say, shaky at best. Some are tagged correctly, but some require a lot of OCR.
On Windows, I use a combination of Microsoft Edge and Adobe Acrobat to read the documents. Adobe has a setting where it will show a page view for each page and you can OCR the pdf file and go from page to page, as well as interacting with tables of contents and embedded hyperlinks.
One thing the Mac does super well is that Voiceover can describe images on a page. This describes the pictures and charts in the books in a way that Jaws and NVDA don't even come close to. Unfortunately, I really need to be able to see the text and preferably navigate it by elements like tables.
Is there a good PDF handler for Mac that will do what I need here? At a minimum, I need to navigate effectively through a document, explore tables, and describe images that accompany the text.
Thanks for any help you might be able to provide.

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