Screen Readers

foreign PDF accessibility Solutions reach everyone screen readers accessibility can be seen every day in things such as handicap parking spaces closed captioning on your television or textured Pavements one of the greatest barriers for people who are blind or have low vision is access to written information if you cannot see or cannot see well reading can be a difficult or insurmountable task this can make using computers smartphones and the internet something most of us do every day very difficult if not impossible people who have low vision or are blind may have a wide variety of visual perception they may have some Vision but still be unable to read print or text on a screen due to color blindness blurry vision tunnel vision or even Vision within a regularly obscured field they may be able to detect light or shadow or they may see nothing at all and many people who are blind or have low vision are able to get around and function within their environment but still are unable to see clearly enough to read screen readers are the most common tools for accessing digital information that are used by people who are blind or have low vision people who have dyslexia learning disabilities temporary disabilities such as concussion other print disabilities such as stroke or brain injuries and people who prefer learning through auditory formats also use screen readers they provide the information by reading aloud digitally coded content contained within the digital documents and websites many blind people also use connected Braille displays which convert the data provided by the screen reader into Braille Braille is the only way for a person who is deaf-blind to access digital information fortunately screen readers are built into much of our technology now from your television Hardware to game consoles to smartphones and you will find screen reading technology available on computers laptops and tablets however screen readers do not see what is on the screen they read aloud information provided digitally by means of digital encoding for PDF documents this encoding is called Tags because the screen readers rely on these digital tags and not the visual content to read the information aloud sometimes what a cited person sees is not what a blind or partially cited person gets the tags must be applied correctly in order for the content to be accurately relayed by the screen reader tags serve many functions they communicate structure and relationships to assistive technology some are for headings so a person using a screen reader can skim through the content much as a sighted person would do with newspaper headlines without headings a person using a screen reader would have to read every single word to find a specific piece of information some tags describe images since people using assistive technology often cannot see what they depict other tags are for reading order so that the content is not read out of order just adding an extra line or a paragraph to your document can throw off the digital reading order even if it is visually in the correct place understanding how content needs to be tagged is part of learning to produce accessible documents applications and websites let’s examine this document using a screen reader we have chosen to use nvda as it is a free download available to anyone here’s what happens when a screen reader attempts to read a PDF document that is entirely untagged PDF sample as image.pdf alert empty document this document appears to be empty it may be a scanned image that needs OCR or it may be a malformed document if you are blind or have low vision you will get no usable information of any kind about this document even when a document is tagged it’s important that it be tagged correctly let’s have another look at the same document this time tagged but only partially this document is not properly tagged and you will see some of the common issues faced by people using assistive technology to access digital information we will be using the Tab Key to move around the document and we will move ahead before all content is read in some cases you will also see the text being read highlighted on the page and we will show the nvda viewer so that you can see what the screen reader is perceiving digitally as it reads aloud note also that there are many voices available to be used with screen readers and they can read at great speed if the person using the technology is able to keep up much like a sighted person would speed read for this demonstration we have chosen a human sounding voice and set it to a normal conversational speed graphic notice that the screen reader has not identified this image other than to say graphic a person using the screen reader will have no idea what this graphic is heading level 1 save up to 90 on time and resources this content has been read out of order an entire section of text has been skipped equidox has helped to improve our remediate inaccessible PDFs quickly and easily this text has not been identified as a heading and again content read out of order graphic rectangle graphic rectangle equidox services graphic box graphic box graphic box these descriptions of background rectangles are unnecessary and confusing they should not be included heading level 2 conversion Services heading level 2 vpats evaluation and completion heading level 2 accessibility Services equidox team remediates your PDFs testing training Consulting and again content read out of order graphic logo graphic logo visit www.equadocs.co or email equidox sales onyxnet.com within this short document we have found the following errors images with no alt text description text with incorrect reading order unidentified headings unnecessary background objects announced that are confusing visually this document is perfectly comprehensible but because it lacks correct digital tagging a person using assistive technology such as a braille display or screen reader is not going to get an equivalent experience and more importantly isn’t going to get all the information screen readers are a valuable tool for people who are blind or who have low vision but they are only as good as the digital encoding in the documents and web pages that they are accessing for more information about how equidox software company can help you with PDF accessibility email us at equidox sales equidox.co or give us a call at 216-529-3030 or visit our website at www.equidox.co