Adobe Acrobat Read Out Loud without reading line numbers

[CHERIE5FEF]

For PDFs with line numbers, is there a way to get the Read Out Loud feature in Acrobat Pro 2020 to not read the number at the start of every line? 

[try67]

Only if you place the line numbers as the values of form fields.

[CHERIE5FEF]

Can this be done after the fact, in a .pdf manuscript that was sent to me (i.e. not one that I created)?

[JR Boulay]

May be by tagging them as artifacts?

[CHERIE5FEF]

I couldn't figure out how to tag the line numbers as artifacts.   

If a document has 602 lines, would this require me to individually tag all 602 lines?

Thanks.

[JR Boulay]

I'm afraid the answer is yes…

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

Question: why are you concerned about how Acrobat's Read Out Loud utility processes line numbers?

It's not a compliant PDF-UA-1 screen reader. Most of us consider it a piece of junk that doesn't read anything correctly.

If you're testing for accessibility compliance, then you need to use a bonafide screen reader, such as as JAWS, NVDA, etc. and evaluate the results from them.

—Bevi

[CHERIE5FEF]

OK, let me re-phrase the question.  I get sent lots of long manuscripts in PDF format to read.  They often have line numbers.  I want the computer to read them outloud to me, quickly, without reading the line numbers outloud.  I can't seem to find a program for MacOS that will read the PDF without reading the line numbers.   Do you have recommendations for any program that will do that?  It looks like JAWS and NVDA are Windows only?  I've tried using VoiceOver on the Mac, but I can't highlight the text to read without including the line numbers. 

I have no control over how the manuscripts are created.  I can't ask the authors to go back and remove the line numbers, or anything like that. 

Thanks for any suggestions of applications that might work, if it's not possible with Acrobat's Read Out Loud feature.

[try67]

Why not use the Redaction tool to remove them in Acrobat?

[CHERIE5FEF]

Thanks try67.  I just tried that, but it seems to require clicking on every line number to redact it.  If there are 602 lines in a document, that gets a bit tedious.  I couldn't find a way to redact all line numbers at once. 

[try67 · Accepted solution]

If you hold down Ctrl while creating the redaction annotation you could select an entire area.

And if the line numbers repeat on each page at the same location you could then duplicate that area from one page to others, and remove them all at once.

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

Unfortunately, the Mac OS doesn't have any capable screen readers. Engineers tell me that it's a Mac thing that prevents developers from creating them.

So yes, JAWS and NVDA are available only on Windows.

Apple's Voice Over is extremely limited--it's not a fully compliant assistive technology, merely a low-end text-to-speech program.

If you are vision-impaired and must use a screen reader, try ABBYY FineReader for Mac (it's also on Windows). It has many tools to correct PDFs for use with screen readers / text-to-speech programs. https://pdf.abbyy.com/finereader-pdf-for-mac/  It might have something to help you out.

[JR Boulay]

"I couldn't find a way to redact all line numbers at once. "

The Search & Redact function allows you to search for text using GREP queries.

Unfortunately we cannot enter a GREP regex in the drop-down list provided, but with a little skill we can hack the XML files which contain these requests and which are in one of the sub-folders of Acrobat.