Re: [orca-list] a suggestion to solve pdf reading with orca.

["Krishnakant Mane" <hackingkk gmail com>]

On 10/10/2008, Scott Berry <sberry northlc com> wrote:
>       Hello there,
>
> I find this a wonderful idea.  A couple of things though that should be
> in the main release in my view would be:
>
> 1. pdf2html implementation
poppler utils already has pdf to html (without the spaces ).
and it will not be difficult to integrate it.
> 2.  pdf2txt implementation

Same as above.

> Lastly,  why not some integration with xsane so we could also be able to
> scan in to pdf for coworkers and such.  I think if this were to happen
> this would be a very viable solution.  Also in later releases of the
> program we could then do some integration right in to evince once all
> the accessible issues have been addressed.
Yes, however the headings, fonts size and bold italics etc must be
reported so is the case with alignment.
Having proper access to pdf has one more big (and also practically
professional ) advantage to many many blind people.
Today we all know that latex with its classes like beamer have
excelent presentation generating capability.
As a side note, I often get very nice comments and overvelming
amaisment from people who see my presentations which I create using
latex and then convert it to pdf for a slide show.

Latex is some thing which can give blind people a reputation of "they
can really make professional quality, richly formatted and well
structured reports or presentation ".

Now talking about a pygtk based pdf reader will have one advantage
that we will be able ot read the pdf files.
But evince has a wonderful presentation mode which leaves me even more
wanting for accessibility in evince.


> I also think once this
> becomes a good solution heck why not include it in to Orca like Jaws
> includes a FS reader component?
Yes indeed it is a great idea which even I shared in my first mail
starting this thread.

Now what we need to do is some couple of people amongst us (include me
in ) must talk wit the evince hackers in details in context of the bug
report pointed out by wili.  We can then decide whether fixing those
bugs to the extent of rudimentary accessibility take more time or will
writing a new reader consume more time.
And yes acrobat reader might or might not have accessibility, but
remember acrobat reader is not free software.
and we must not encourage proprietory softwares for best (and obvious ) reasons.
Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.

> On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 18:50 +0530, Krishnakant Mane wrote:
> > hello all,
> > I know this issue has come up before and I personally brought it up many
> > times.
> > However after what willi explained me off the list, I have been
> > thinking about it.
> > The issue is with reading pdf files through any free software pdf reader.
> > We now know the problem with evince pdf reader.
> >
> > It is very unfortunate that the developers did not consider this very
> > important.
> > Any ways the bug is in the processs of being fixt and I am aware that
> > it could be a lot of work and will take a long time for it to become
> > fixt.
> >
> > Perhaps it will take more than a couple of releases of gnome before we
> > have some good degree of accessibility with evince.
> >
> > Now with the given problem, I have a suggestion.
> > Why don't we try and create a rudimentary gtk based simple pdf reader.
> > It could be as simple as a text editor.  all that is urgently needed
> > is to read a pdf file and get its font information and other
> > attributes like bold italics and size of the font.
> > Just like some screen readers provide additional value added service,
> > we may as well do it for orca.
> > This pdf reader should be as simple as possible and we may not
> > immidiately go into implementing very advanced features.
> >
> > if the community agrees to this at large, then I would take the
> > initiative.
> > happy hacking.
> > Krishnakant.
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