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

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com> wrote:
> 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. 

The challenge would be to implement tagged PDF, which is the part of the
specification of most relevance to accessibility. As far as I know, there are
no free software implementations of this, except for LibreOffice, which can
write it but can't read it. I think ConTeXt can also write it.

The solution would be to take the best existing PDF library and add support
for tagged PDF.