Re: [orca-list] Orca Enhancement work

[Aparna Ramamurthy <aparna ramamurthy gmail com>]

hi,

We did consider the option of tagged pdf - you are right in mentioning that no open source pdf reader currently has support for this. But after doing a complete feasibility study on this, it seemed that our approach was more feasible at this stage and would give a robust solution more quickly. Given that making pdf documents has been the need of the day for sometime now, time was a critical factor.

Our approach creates an HTML version of the pdf document. Hence, now essentially, Firefox acts as a PDF reader. PDF documents open in Firefox, and Orca can read it - all the pdf navigation page wise, line wise, etc is maintained. Thanks to this, now all pdf documents can be read, without having to depend on other PDF readers.

Based on the feedback we get from all users, we will enhance this further and could also think of implementing the tagged PDF approach.

With warm regards,
Aparna
(on behalf of CDAC team)

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 11:57 AM, Jason White <jason jasonjgw net> wrote:

leena chourey <leenagour gmail com> wrote:

> Our efforts make a pdf document open in firefox. So from Orca when a user
> opens a pdf document (on a key binding) the document opens, as is, in
> firefox and Orca reads it from there - with this technique, the document
> formatting appears to be intact, Orca reads the document properly and this
> method is not restricted to any one particular pdf reader application. We
> have, at the same time, also enhanced Evince to support the changes that we
> have done, so if someone wants to open the document with evince then evince
> opens, but on a key binding the file is opened in Firefox and control passes
> there.

Have you implemented support for tagged PDF? This is currently missing in both
xpdf/poppler and ghostscript; there's a possibility that the GNU PDF library
(currently under development) may implement it if someone volunteers to do the
work.

In my opinion, the lack of a free software/open-source implementation of the
relevant parts of the PDF spec, covering tagged PDF and accessibility, is the
main problem in this area.

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-- 
With warm regards,
Aparna R
Senior Staff Scientist
CDAC Mumbai