Re: [orca-list] Pdf accessibility in Linux was Re: Trying Quantal Quetsal Alpha 3

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hi Alex and all,

It sounds to me like what we need here is for someone to write a
talking pdf viewer/reader. I really don't think creating such an
application would be all that difficult. After all, as has been
discussed there is an open pdf document standard used by a number of
open source applications. All we really need to do is create an
accessible graphical document reader using something like the GTK+ 3
toolkit, and then maybe wrap speech-dispatcher for speech output. If
this is of interest to anyone I think I'd be willing to start the
groundwork for such a talking pdf viewer. This would make pdf
documents just as accessible as for Windows and we wouldn't have to
depend on Adobe for a speech friendly viewer. Any thoughts?

Cheers!


On 8/2/12, Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com> wrote:
> Thanks for that info, Don.  Bringing this to the list for anyone who
> would care to chime in:
>
> I remember seeing an application called Evince gtk which set it apart
> from Evince.  Has anyone been able to gather whether or not it is any
> more accessible than Evince proper?  Also, can anyone confirm that
> what it does is just put up a picture of the text in the pdf document
> instead of actual textual characters which a screen reader could read?
>  I never got around to testing it myself because Ubuntu wanted to yank
> out Evince proper in order to replace it with Evince GTK.  Evince GTK
> was not listed as a Gnome dependency whereas the original version of
> it was and yanking it made my system want to go ahead and yank just
> about all of Gnome with it.  As that was a production system, I did
> not relish the prospect of breaking it just to satisfy my curiosity.
>
> As for Acroread, I am seriously considering contacting the
> accessibility person at Adobe using the e-mail Don provides below.
> Adobe has made some efforts in the past to get their documetns
> accessible and they have succeeded very nicely in Windows.  I remember
> how I used to dread pdf's about 10 years ago or so.  These days, it's
> just another document type to me.  It would be nice if we could make
> that happen for us in Linux as well.
>
> Alex M