Quote:
Originally Posted by DMSmillie
Indeed. However it still relies on the PDF having been constructed in a way that results in meaningful information being read out. If it's a series of whole page images, there won't be anything to read out. If it's been cobbled together in a DTP package, you can sometimes end up listening to the page contents being read out in a completely illogical order - paragraph 5, followed by an image caption, followed by the page heading, followed by paragraph 2, etc.
- Donna
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Hm, now that we agree that PDF is an open format, the problem is DTP formatting, or image scans?
How is this a uniquely PDF problem? One can import a non-OCR-ed image of a text page into a .doc, or a PlainText document, and it will be equally unreadable by text-to-speech.
Why do you blame PDFs for the shortcomings of the "sophisticated" (read "very expensive and government subsidized") software and hardware, which cannot do what a free reader can do?
As to "DTP packages" (I am assuming you mean a more complex, visual layout), I doubt it is a large problem for government documents, which generally look like ..., well, government documents.
And as a policy matter, it is hardly wiser to strip publications which rely on visual appeal of their design attributes, so that blind people can easily listen to them, than it is to ban radio, because deaf people can't hear it....
The bottom line is that the title of this thread is totally inaccurate.