[Trainer-Talk] The PDF Konundrum

[Curtis Chong]

Greetings everyone:

Introduction

PDF documents continue to present a significant challenge for people who rely on screen readers to read them. Historically, the primary way most of us read these documents was to use the free Adobe Acrobat software. Today, in addition to Adobe, we can use browsers like Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox to open those PDF files which do not contain scanned images of text. In addition, we are seeing a growing number of electronic forms distributed as PDF files which, if we were lucky, we could fill out using the free Adobe software.

Regarding PDF forms, the first thing I want to pass on in this email is to let you know that in addition to Adobe, you can also try filling out a PDF form using Mozilla Firefox, the only browser that I know of which supports our ability to fill out PDF forms.

A positive aspect of reading PDFs and/or filling out PDF forms in a browser is that browsers do not require us to perform up-front configuration tasks simply to be able to read a PDF file. One just has to remember to use CTRL+O to bring up an Open dialog to get the PDF file into the browser. Adobe software, on the other hand, does require some configuration tasks.

On the less positive side, a PDF file opened in the browser cannot be scraped for scanned text.

Configuring and Using Adobe Software to Read PDF Files

Since Adobe Acrobat continues to be a viable option for us, I thought it would be useful for me to pass along what I have learned over the years about configuring and using Adobe Reader. Here is an article that I put together which has been recently updated. Some of this article is intended for I.T. folks who configure desktop computers for blind end users. The rest is intended for end users who need to use Adobe software every day.

Configuring Adobe Reader
A Guide
For Screen Reader Users

By Curtis Chong


The acronym PDF stands for Portable Document Format. The PDF format was created by a company called Adobe Systems. PDF seems to be the most widely-used format used to circulate files over the Internet. The PDF format is popular and used almost universally because of its ability to maintain the "look and feel" of a document regardless of the platform where the document is viewed.

For those of us who rely on screen readers to use the various technologies which make up a part of our everyday lives, PDF has oftentimes been used as a three-letter expletive because of the numerous difficulties we oftentimes experience when we try to read a PDF document that we have received. I hope through this article to provide details about what is for me the solution which I myself use to tackle the PDF problem--a problem which I can often (but not always) solve using the information I am about to share.

The first thing that is important to know is that a PDF file can contain real text, pictures of text, or a combination of both real and scanned text. Screen reading software does its best work if it has real text to process. Anything that looks like text but which is actually an image of text forces screen reader users to use something called optical character recognition (OCR) to convert images of text into text that the screen reader can process. OCR is less than 100% accurate; in fact, pictures of text that come to us from the past often contain images of text which today's modern OCR software is unable to recognize with any acceptable accuracy. If a picture of a bank statement is processed with OCR technology, fives could be converted to dollar signs or vice versa. Ones and the lower case I could be confused. Nevertheless, now that I have provided you with this bleak picture, let us move on to what can be done to enable a screen reader to get the best information it can from a PDF file.

I have been reading PDF files for decades. Of all the tools I have used, I believe that the free Adobe Acrobat Reader for Windows provides the most favorable experience for a screen reader user. While many PDF files containing text can be read in browsers like Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome, the combination of Adobe Acrobat Reader and JAWS for Windows offers the most optimal combination of software to read PDF files. The free Adobe Acrobat software can be downloaded at https://get.adobe.com/reader/. Before downloading the software, be sure to uncheck the Install Adobe Express Photos and the Install McAfee Security Scan Plus checkboxes.

Regardless of whether the PDF file contains readable text, scanned text, or both, JAWS offers the tools that the screen reader user needs to get the most out of a file format that has become somewhat problematic even under the best of circumstances. However, before the value of Adobe Acrobat reader can be realized, there are some important steps that the first-time user of this program must perform.


Configuring Adobe Acrobat Reader For Accessibility

1.	By default, Adobe Acrobat Reader will be using what it calls the New Acrobat Reader menu. You can tell that you are using the New Acrobat Reader menu by tapping the ALT key. If nothing happens when you do this, you are definitely using the New Acrobat Reader menu. If, on the other hand, the traditional menu bar is displayed, then you are using the traditional menus which work best with the JAWS screen reader.

To bring back the traditional menu bar in Adobe Acrobat Reader, press the ALT key together with the letter f. A context menu appears. Arrow up to the Disable New Acrobat Reader item and press Enter. After a few seconds, you will be prompted to restart the program. Go ahead and perform the restart. Now, your Adobe Acrobat Reader software is using the traditional menu bar.

2.	Now, ensure that you have the most current version of Adobe Acrobat Reader installed. Press ALT+H to enter the Help menu, and press the letter c to activate the Check for Updates function. If you are told that there are no updates available, you can be sure that your Adobe Acrobat Reader software is up to date.

3.	Now that you have the traditional menu bar in place, you need to configure Adobe Acrobat Reader for accessibility.

A.	First, be sure that you have Adobe Acrobat Reader set up to be the default program to open PDF files. The easiest way that I have found to do this is to use File Explorer to focus on a PDF file, bring up the file properties dialog by pressing ALT+ENTER, then SHIFT+TAB to and activate the "Change..." button. In the resulting dialog, change the program that opens the PDF file to Adobe Acrobat Reader.

B.	Configure the way in which Adobe Acrobat Reader reads files. Open any PDF file then press CTRL+SHIFT+5 to enter the Reading Options for Assistive Technology dialog. (If Adobe Acrobat Reader's modern menu had still been in effect, this key command would not have work.) The first field in the dialog determines how much of the document is loaded into memory when it is opened. Set this to Read the entire document. The second field determines the reading order. My personal default is to read the document from left to right, top to bottom; but there are times when the reading order needs to be changed. The third field in this dialog is a checkbox which determines whether these settings will be applied to all documents opened with Adobe Acrobat Reader. I recommend checking this box. Finally, activate the Confirm button.

C.	With a PDF file open in Adobe Reader, press CTRL+K to enter the Preferences dialog. This takes you to a dialog with 30 tabs. Press the letter "s" repeatedly until you are focused on something called "Security (Enhanced)." Tab once to reach the "Sandbox Protections Grouping Enable Protected Mode at startup." Press space repeatedly to be sure that this checkbox is not checked. Shift tab to and activate the OK button.

D.	With a PDF file open in Adobe Reader, press CTRL+K to enter the Preferences dialog. Press the letter r to focus on the Reading tab. Tab about four times to arrive at a checkbox called "Override the reading order in tagged documents." Uncheck this box to ensure that your preferred reading order is always used when a document is untagged but still enables tags to be recognized and handled when a document is appropriately tagged. Shift Tab two times to focus on the checkbox “Confirm before tagging documents” and ensure this is not checked.


Tips For Working With Adobe Acrobat Reader with a Screen Reader

Remember the CTRL+SHIFT+5 command discussed earlier? There are times when you have to change the reading order to improve the PDF reading experience. For example, if the PDF file that is being opened is a form that is supposed to be filled out using the free Adobe Acrobat Reader, reading the document from left to right could result in the form fields not being detected by the screen reader. An example of this type of document is Colorado's online voter registration form, found at https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/vote/VoterRegFormEnglish.pdf. If this PDF file is opened using the left-to-right reading order, none of the fields that the voter needs to fill in are recognized by the screen reader. Changing the reading order to "Infer Reading Order From Document" solves this problem.

For very large PDF documents that are more than 50 pages long, you may find that when the document is opened, there are a few minutes of complete silence where the screen reader has gone silent. My advice when this happens is simply to wait it out.

While Acrobat Reader has the ability to find text within an open PDF file (using the CTRL+F keyboard command), it is not possible for screen reader users to use this command with any degree of success. I recommend using the JAWS find command (CTRL+JAWSKEY+F) instead to invoke the first find and the F3 function key to repeat the search going forward and SHIFT+F3 to search in reverse.

For those people who want to navigate to a specific page within a PDF document, pressing CTRL+SHIFT+N brings up the Go To Page dialog. Initially, the edit field which appears shows the current page number. To move to a new page, type in the page number and press Enter to go there.

Sometimes, you might want to know how many pages are contained within the PDF document you have opened. The easiest way I have found to do this is to press CTRL+D to bring up the document properties dialog. Then, if you are using JAWS, you need to virtualize the window that has just been opened. Press ALT+INSERT+W to virtualize the window and ESCAPE to close.


Using the JAWS Optical Character Recognition Feature Against a PDF File

There are situations where PDF documents contain scanned images of text as opposed to characters that can be detected and read by a screen reading program such as JAWS for Windows. If a PDF document contains only scanned text, JAWS will indicate this by saying “Alert: Empty Document” after the file is opened in Adobe Acrobat. Press INSERT+SPACE then O, then D to tell JAWS to perform optical character recognition against the open file. JAWS will process the file and bring up the results in a virtual window of text which you can then copy into whatever document you need to create.


Conclusion

While reading PDF documents is not an ideal experience for screen reader users today, the use of Adobe's free Acrobat Reader software combined with the configuration steps outlined above can improve the quality of the reading and interaction experience. I will point out here that even under the best of circumstances, however, PDF forms are oftentimes not as easy for screen reader users to use as compared to forms that are coded in HTML. Those of us who use and depend on screen reading technology every day of our lives to get work done prefer not to have to deal with PDF files at all, but when we must work with them, the information I have provided here will make the experience less painful.

Cordially,

Curtis Chong