Re: [orca-list] Accessible GUI PDF reader

[Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com>]

You are correct.

The closest I've been able to come to an accessible pdf reader in Linux is
one called gpdf but it is far from ideal.  Its gui is downright minimal and
navigating through a pdf document with it is quite difficult.  Next closest
was Acroread by Adobe which only made one line of the entire pdf document
accessible.  I suspect it could be made usable if the read out loud
functionality were updated to work with how Linux now approaches speech
synthesis.  It uses gnome-speech I believe.  If it could be made to use
speech Dispatcher, you could simply have it read a pdf document out loud to
you.  Whether gpdf or acroread, the pdf documents that can be accessed are
passive static pdf files.  Interactive pdf's such as those containing forms
cannot be accessed in Linux at this time as far as I know.  You would have
to set up a copy of windows in a virtual machine using VmWare and then use
Jaws or NVDA with Adobe Reader or Acrobat X to get at them.  Evince, the pdf
reader that comes with gnome is, for the moment, completely useless to
someone with a screen reader and will probably remain so for the foreseeable
future since there is only one person working on it as a volunteer and prior
messages on this subject on this mailing list indicate that the time he has
to dedicate to this effort is very limited.  

Hth,
Alex M


-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list-bounces gnome org [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On
Behalf Of S. Massy
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2012 2:45 PM
To: orca-list gnome org
Subject: [orca-list] Accessible GUI PDF reader

Hello,
It is my understanding that there is no such thing as an accessible
graphical PDF under Linux at this point: is that correct? I tried evince-gtk
and could only access the "panel" but not the text.
Personally, I do all my PDF reading in the console, but I am trying to
assess the level of accessibility with orca.
Cheers,
S.M.

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