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Raphael Fetzer :kirby:

@simon You can specify the reading order in a PDF document so the screen reader can follow it and doesn’t need to guess.

24 August at 16:26 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mastodon.social
4 comments
Simon Willison

@pheraph that’s reassuring! Do you know if published papers tend to do that? Any way for me to tell if this one works properly? storage.googleapis.com/gweb-re

24 August at 16:27 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Raphael Fetzer :kirby:

@simon I am no expert in that field, maybe @yatil has an answer. In my experience PDF files often have tons of accessibility issues. You can check your specific document here: pave-pdf.org/pave/index.html It should highlight if the reading order isn’t specified.

24 August at 16:32 | Open on mastodon.social
jleedev

@simon @pheraph That PDF isn't tagged, so the only way to read it is in the page content order, which fortunately is sensible enough to present one column and then the other, but things like footnotes and figures run inline.

24 August at 16:59 | Open on mastodon.sdf.org
James Scholes

@simon This specific PDF is not tagged for accessibility, and is literally unreadable with NVDA plus Acrobat Reader on Windows. For instance, here's an excerpt of what I'm hearing:

> SQLhasbeenextremelysuccessfulasthedefactostandardlanguageforworkingwithdata.Virtuallyallmainstreamdatabase-like systemsuseSQLastheirprimaryquerylanguage.ButSQLisan oldlanguagewithsignificantdesignproblems,makingitdifficultto learn,difficulttouse,

24 August at 17:20 | Open on dragonscave.space
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