Read out loud is working but it is pausing between each line

Question

I have version 2019.008.20071 and I had followed the instructions that you had provided in this posting: Re: PDF read out loud is working but pauses on new line

I have utilized the cleaner tool and installed the reader back. I also checked the text to speech. I have a Windows 10 machine and it happens in all pdf files.

Rajjeet13949781 · Accepted Answer

Acrobat's Read Aloud is not a screen reader.

Repeat: it is NOT a screen reader.

It does not access and render the content (aka, voice it) per current PDF/UA-1 and WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards. It does not have the majority of user controls that real screen readers have. And it consistently mis-reads basic content.

Do not waste your time testing a document for screen reader accessibility with Acrobat's Read Aloud tool. It will give you false positives and false negatives.

Many of us in the professional accessibility world have asked Adobe to either fix Read Aloud and make it a full-featured, compliant tool, or remove it from Acrobat entirely.

Do your testing with a real screen reader:

JAWS by Freedom Scientific https://www.freedomscientific.com/Products/Blindness/JAWS
NVDA (which is free) https://www.nvaccess.org/

And don't forget to test for enlargement with ZOOM text, keyboard accessibility, and reading order for other AT (assistive technologies).

Accessibility is for all disabilities, not just blindness.

As Bevi suggested, please use JAWS or NVDA for testing a document for screen reader accessibility.

Read Out Loud was never designed as a complete Accessibility Solution. Respective screen readers like JAWS/NVDA for Windows and VoiceOver for Mac are the best available screen reader solutions (primarily for vision disabilities). That's one of the reasons that Adobe started funding NVDA (through NVAccess) to address the goals of accessibility support for PDFs in Acrobat Reader.

It's better to invest in providing a first-class screen reader experience than to over-haul ROL and keep playing a catch-up game with established screen readers which are already doing a great job and have much better and deeper integrations with respective operating systems.

ROL can be used as a tool in cases of situational disabilities (driving a car, cooking, reading outside on a sunny day) or as a very basic entry level tool (not calling it a screen reader yet) for users who don't want to learn how screen readers work.

keithg10588254 · Answer

I don't believe that Microsoft Word was designed as a full screen reader either, but it works. The fact that Adobe Reader has the capability to do text-to-speech, but it's maddening to use because it's inserting something like a one-second pause between every one-second blast of text sound (changing the wpm setting just makes it speak faster, but leaves the same break between words), tells one that the capability could be tweaked to, say, not put a one-second pause between words. I didn't construe the original post's question to be looking for a full accessibility solution, just trying to get it to work as well as, say, Word, or Outlook. And I'm in that same boat, perhaps needless to say. Thanks.

Repeat: it is NOT a screen reader.

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