[Athen] VoiceOver and PDFs

[Bourne, Sarah (MASSIT)]

Michael,

There was a recent thread on the WebAIM mailing list that you may find helpful:
http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=8178

And also this slightly older thread:
http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=7518

sb
Sarah E. Bourne
Director of IT Accessibility, MassIT
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
1 Ashburton Pl. rm 811 Boston MA 02108
617-626-4502
sarah.bourne at mass.gov<mailto:sarah.bourne at mass.gov>
http://www.mass.gov/MassIT

From: athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Michael Nakai
Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2017 5:52 PM
To: athen-list at u.washington.edu
Subject: [Athen] VoiceOver and PDFs

Hello,

I just recently joined this list after hearing about it attending last week's AHEAD Conference. So I assume that this question has been asked in the past.

But I was wondering if people have encountered issues with Apple's VoiceOver treatment of reading order tags that are embedded in a PDF.

To me it seems that it's ignoring the tags and reading order information that I have embedded in a file of mine.

I've ran it through a few options options and here are my results

Programs that have read this correctly:
Acrobat for Windows Read Out Loud
Foxit Reader for Windows
NVDA reading the same document loaded in Acrobat
Kurzweil 3000 for Windows
Acrobat for iOS in VoiceOver
ClaroPDF for iOS, (Works with VoiceOver, also has a built-in speech reader that recognizes the read order)

Programs that have not read this correctly:
Previewing this file in macOS, and iOS (Ignored specified reading order)
iBooks in iOS (Ignored specified reading order)
PDF Connoisseur for iOS, (VoiceOver will not read the document)
PDF Expert for iOS (VoiceOver will not read the document)

Programs that have mixed success:
Foxit Reader for iOS (VoiceOver will not read the document, but the app has a built-in speech reader that recognizes the read order)


So I was just wondering if other institutions have had similar frustrations in getting an accessible document to be read (if at all) consistently across different applications and platforms? If so, is there something that I can use in the PDF creation process to ensure the text flow is observed in Preview and iBooks?

Michael Nakai
Adaptive Technology
WSU Disability Services
michaelnakai at weber.edu<mailto:michaelnakai at weber.edu>
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