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



On 8/2/2012 5:10 PM, Juanjo Marín wrote:

T hanks 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.



AFAIK, Evince GTK is just Evince without GNOME keyring support. PDF 
accessibilty is a tricky business. There is a developer, Daniel García, who has been 
working in adding basic PDF accessibilty to Evince. 

He has done quite well with the interface, I must say.  I have had no success making the application actually serve me for reading a pdf document, however. 



      
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

On 8/2/12, Donald Marang <donald marang verizon net> wrote:
 I do not know.  We can ask the accessibility person at Adobe.  I do not
 know how much power he has.  He tries to advocate getting accessibility
 issues with Adobe products resolved.  Most of the time, it seems new
 features and schedules win out!  This position used to be filled by Kirk
 Killpatrick, but since the feed never has a name anymore, I have no idea
 if he still works at this position.  The email is:

 access adobe com

 I do not have much faith in the evince application getting access to the
 content either!  The last I looked, it is an image viewer designed to
 view PostScript images.  It's developers do not seem interested in
 adding accessibility, especially when it would require a complete rewrite!


Evince development is just a volunteer effort.  It's not a matter of interest, it just 
a matter of lack time and resources. So I guess Daniel will be able to accomplish 
his goal only if he has enough free time.

Well, I think is unfair to compare the Acrobat to Evince. I wonder why Evince
is accused of lack of interest and a big company with _lots_ of resources isn't.
Anyway, sometimes David can do more than Goliath :-) . I think that basic pdf 
accessibility support is possible in Evince without any complete rewite and this 
is what Dani is working on.
Do you know if he has a time table?  How long has he been working on this? 

In Acroread, I think some serious headway could be made if the "read out loud" feature were made to work with speech dispatcher.  It calls for gnome-speech right now and I haven't been able to figure out hwo it connects to it so that it reads the content of the pdf.  Perhaps, I need to put Festival in or something and add the code to the init.scm file to make it talk through PUlse.  Hmm.  Will touch base soon.  I think I may have hit upon something!

Alex M

Cheers,

    -- Juanjo Marin




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