|
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. Do you know if he has a time table? How long has he been working on this?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. 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 --
Alex Midence
|