On 25/08/11 20:01, Jude DaShiell wrote: > pdf has accessibility issues for screen reader users
Some pdfs have issues. Some of the pdf issues are accessibility. :-) Some html files also have accessibility issues... > and riverwind and me are both screen reader users. And you are not alone. > The best we can attempt is a text extraction from pdf files if we're > going to read what's in them. Then you have been sadly misinformed. I have no problems reading the pdf I linked with Ocular (using kttsd) - I prefer the html version, but I wouldn't want it as a single file. I'd recommend careful preparation (food, drink, sleeping bag etc) before attempting to screen read a single page documents made from 544 pages - or spend the next few hours trying to kill speech-dispatch (without the benefit of a reader) to find it's PID! ;-D > If what was left in the file was a scanned image, maybe that can be > scanned on Windows I don't know that parallel capability exists with > Linux yet. Usually the other way around. Eg. one day Windoof will have screenreading built-in to the core and people will stop forking out big dollars thinking JAWS is "assistive technology". Tesseract does an excellent job of OCRing pdfs that are just image - there are GUI options. > Also, whenever text extraction gets done on pdf files with command > line tools with Linux there are spelling mistakes in the output. I'm assuming you use Orca (or whatever Gnome calls it's reader) - surely that works with the Gnome PDF viewer? > The pdf format is just something those of us that can't see the > screen would be really happy if either Adobe had never come into > existence or invented that format. If Microsoft ceased to exist I'd agree - but they do, and the best I can do with some "users" is get them to send me a pdf *instead* of a "rent-a-view" Office document or some other proprietary method of making information asymmetrically accessible.... It's a less than perfect world so I accept less than perfect solutions. > Also, knowledgeable sighted > technical people I talk with hate Adobe and pdf with a passion and > they can't all be wrong. Originally Adobe *was* pdf. This is no longer the case - it was made an open standard three years ago (ISO 32000-1:2008). Plain text is good, RTF is nice, HTML is better. Sadly, many people have problems with cross-platform text files, and HTML is often made ugly and unusable, PDFs can be ugly too - but most people have no problems viewing or printing them. So often pdfs are often the "least worst" format for styled text and image documents. It's also a handy format for saving reference webpages. > > On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Curt wrote: > <snipped> > > Cheers -- "If the FBI's motivating factor for busting down the Koresh compound was child abuse, how come we never see Bradley tanks smashing into Catholic churches?" ~ Bill Hicks -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4e5636ad.3070...@gmail.com
