Read Out Loud reading words as letters or acronyms

• Acrobat's Read Out Loud (ROL) doesn't recognize the tag set in the PDF/UA-1 standard.
• And it doesn't provide any of the user features that people find in real screen readers, such as JAWS and NVDA.
• And it doesn't recognize form fields, so you can't fill out a form with it.
• And depending upon how the original content creator created the source document in Word, PowerPoint, InDesign, etc., it will sometimes read horizontally across the columns of text, rather than follow the natural reading order of a multi-column page.
• And ROL doesn't follow any reading order whatsoever, but per the PDF/UA-1 specification, it's supposed to follow the tag tree's reading order. Sometimes ROL reads the architectural/construction reading order, but then again, sometimes not.
• It doesn't recognize language controls.
• Or the metadata in the PDF, which should have language controls specified.
• IIRC it didn't read out the Alt-text on graphics, links, or anything else that has Alt-text.
• And doesn't announce lists.
• Doesn't handle hyperlinks well, including regular URLs, emails, cross-refs, and any others.
• Doesn't recognize a TOC and its individual TOCI (TOC items) and their hyperlinks.
• And IIRC, it was developed before Unicode was standardized so it can choke on other than the basic ASCII character set.

I think it was added to Acrobat with Version 7...that would be in 2004, way before the PDF/UA standard was even being developed.

I doubt Adobe realizes how important a simple screen reader would be for society. I find it's recommended by social workers to those who have failing eyesight or reading dyslexias. But anyone would benefit from this who wants to just listen to a long tech document while doing chores, or working out, or while driving. It doesn't need to be fancy and compete with the big guns.

Just a simple, straightforward version that actually works to the PDF/UA standard (which Adobe creates, BTW).

But I don't see Adobe's head honchos approving the R&D budget for this. They're missing a great marketing opportunity.

Hi,

I'm from the Accessibility Engineering Team from Adobe Acrobat and I'm here to assist you in solving the issues.

Further KS, I need to know the tags and content structure of those specific Heading to find the issue and help you in resolving it. We would be abel to help you only after we can see the file. Would it be possible for you to split and share only that specific page where the issue is being observed?

Thanks

Rachit

Hi Rachit,

Unfortunately, I can't. It's for a client and it's confidential, so I can't share the file. I can tell you that the uppercase word that Read Out Loud is getting correct is "PROGRAM," while the uppercase word it's reading as an acronym is "AWARDEES."

Thanks, KS