Why VoiceOver reads some PDFs strangely was Re: Skim Accessibility

2012-11-09 Thread JAMES AUSTIN 
Hello Dónal et al,
On 9 Nov 2012, at 12:46, Dónal Fitzpatrick  wrote:
  It seems to apply weird hyphenation patterns and cause stilted or interrupted 
speech.

I may be wrong here, so please feel free to correct me, but I think  that this 
problem  stems in part, from the use of ligatures. If I remember, these  are 
italicised finishings to certain letters, also called Serifs. When i spoke to 
an Apple Accessibility team member about this, they  explained what they were, 
and that certain types of font employ them  for stylistic reasons. I.e. They 
look nice, but they make VoiceOver ignore the space between letters and words 
that use them. 

Dónal, if you'd like to write me off-list, I might be able to help you avoid 
them in your LaTeX-created PDFs. For everyone else, if you're creating PDFs 
yourselves, either from Pages or another word processor, try using fonts 
without Serifs, such as Arial or Times. There are others,  and you can find 
them if you do a Google search for something like "sans serif fonts os x"

Hope this helps

Take care
James 

Skype: saulky1984 - If you'd like to chat, please say who you are when 
requesting to chat. Thank you.
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Re: Why VoiceOver reads some PDFs strangely was Re: Skim Accessibility

2012-11-09 Thread Dónal Fitzpatrick 
Hi James,

Super response.  You're absolutely correct in that sometimes (and LaTeX) is a 
classic example) odd glyphs are used.  For example, "fi" in PDF produced by 
LaTeX can cause problems.

Definitely interested in how it can be avoided, and you're more than welcome to 
respond offlist, however it might not be a bad one to post hear.  Perhaps frame 
it in the context of Mac TeX in order to remain on topic?

D:)
On 9 Nov 2012, at 13:40, JAMES AUSTIN  wrote:

> Hello Dónal et al,
> On 9 Nov 2012, at 12:46, Dónal Fitzpatrick  wrote:
>  It seems to apply weird hyphenation patterns and cause stilted or 
> interrupted speech.
> 
> I may be wrong here, so please feel free to correct me, but I think  that 
> this problem  stems in part, from the use of ligatures. If I remember, these  
> are italicised finishings to certain letters, also called Serifs. When i 
> spoke to an Apple Accessibility team member about this, they  explained what 
> they were, and that certain types of font employ them  for stylistic reasons. 
> I.e. They look nice, but they make VoiceOver ignore the space between letters 
> and words that use them. 
> 
> Dónal, if you'd like to write me off-list, I might be able to help you avoid 
> them in your LaTeX-created PDFs. For everyone else, if you're creating PDFs 
> yourselves, either from Pages or another word processor, try using fonts 
> without Serifs, such as Arial or Times. There are others,  and you can find 
> them if you do a Google search for something like "sans serif fonts os x"
> 
> Hope this helps
> 
> Take care
> James 
> 
> Skype: saulky1984 - If you'd like to chat, please say who you are when 
> requesting to chat. Thank you.
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Dónal Fitzpatrick
dfitz...@computing.dcu.ie



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Re: Why VoiceOver reads some PDFs strangely was Re: Skim Accessibility

2012-11-12 Thread Travis Siegel 
I've not tried it on anything above snowleopard, and not all since  
preview added the continuous reading mode, but the softcon pages has  
an application that will let you read pdf files.  It's called softcon  
pdf viewer, and I stopped doing anything with it after preview got  
the continuous read mode as mentioned above, but for those who are  
having trouble with preview, it might be something to try.  I won't  
guarantee better results, only that results might be different.

It's located at the softcon mac pages at:
http://www.softcon.com/mac/
It's not been compiled for the latest versions of osx, so it may not  
even work, but I suppose it's worth a try anyhow.

hth.

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Re: Why VoiceOver reads some PDFs strangely was Re: Skim Accessibility

2012-11-13 Thread Fred Smith 
I'm finding that Adobe Digital Editions 2.0 works quite well with PDFs . With 
VoiceOver, it will read continuously and without cutting off letters as Preview 
does (and Skim and Softcon, in my experience). ADE allows you to pause/restart, 
move up and down a page at a time, adjust the reading speed and so on. It 
doesn't allow you to interact with the text and use the more detailed reading 
commands -- by word, by sentence etc -- but purely for listening, it's the most 
accurate reder I've yet discovered.

Fred




On 13/11/2012, at 4:08 AM, Travis Siegel wrote:

> I've not tried it on anything above snowleopard, and not all since preview 
> added the continuous reading mode, but the softcon pages has an application 
> that will let you read pdf files.  It's called softcon pdf viewer, and I 
> stopped doing anything with it after preview got the continuous read mode as 
> mentioned above, but for those who are having trouble with preview, it might 
> be something to try.  I won't guarantee better results, only that results 
> might be different.
> It's located at the softcon mac pages at:
> http://www.softcon.com/mac/
> It's not been compiled for the latest versions of osx, so it may not even 
> work, but I suppose it's worth a try anyhow.
> hth.
> 
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