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Mac OS and PDF Readers

By Ravenpaw, 10 April, 2023

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Question for people who have experience working with PDF's and Voiceover: have you noticed that Preview, Apple's native reader app, struggles with document read order even if a file has been optimized for accessibility? I've mainly seen this happen when special formatting is involved, like a table or a numbered list. If, for example, I'm trying to read through a list of items 1-10, Voiceover will read all the actual list elements in a single chunk and then announce all the numbers separately. Interestingly enough I can open the same file in Adobe Acrobat and everything will read perfectly fine. Is this just a Preview thing then, or is there some kind of setting that can be adjusted to help it follow the tagged order? Not that I'm against using Adobe or anything, but it's a bit of a bummer that a third-party app does a better job of handling something as basic as this.

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Sadly yes.

By Dennis Westphal

5 months 2 weeks ago

I have found those issues last year when I wanted to use the Mac as my daily driver. Uni-work can simply not acomplished with the lack of "real" PDF-Support. I actually found that sometimes chunks of a PDF-File are randomely missing. That mostly happens if someone creates a PDF from MS Word 2013. I wrote to Apple multiple times with PDF-Files where I have found this issue. But always the same respons: We have not heared of this issue bla bla.

Depending what you want to do with PDFs maybe Speech Central or Voicedream Reader could help you. For me they sadly didn't.

Have a great one
Dennis

Scribe from Pneuma Solutions

By Ekaj

5 months 1 week ago

If the .pdf file is 2 pages or less, you can go to http://www.scribeit.io and sign up to have the file converted into a standard HTML file complete with headings where necessary. I've done this a few times and was pleased with the results. For most pdf files nowadays, I just copy them to my personal website. I of course keep those entries private and turn off commenting, unless I'm absolutely certain that it's something that everyone needs to know. Hth and good luck. This thread has me curious though, now that I have a Braille display.

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