6 ms·

PDFs are the bane of my existence as someone who relies on machine translation everyday. The worst is that so many event flyers and things, even important local

PDFs are the bane of my existence as someone who relies on machine translation everyday. The worst is that so many event flyers and things, even important local government information will just be dumped online as a pdf without there being any other effort to make the contents available. I don't know how blind people are supposed participate in civil life here..

Polylactic_acid 6y ago
The problem is accessibility features are totally invisible to normal users. Someone with good intentions creates a pdf, and it works for them. They don't use screen reader tools or know how they work so they don't even realize there is a problem.
- exikyut 6y ago
  And the problem with that is that the screen reader tools are $1200, because of the huge associated R&D costs and incredibly small target market. The sad thing is that the very complexity required to implement a screen reader is soley because of the technical nightmare information accessibility currently is. It's reasonable to think that "if only" everything could be made ubiquitous and everyone (= developers) could become collectively aware of these accessibility considerations, maybe there would be a shift towards greater semanticity. Thing is, though, that NVDA is open source, and iOS has put a built-in free screen-reader in the hands of every iPhone user... and not much has changed. So it's basically one of those technologies forever stuck in the "initial surge of moonshot R&D to break new ground and realign status quo" phase. :(
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    How much good would moonshot-level R&D even be capable of doing? Without realigning the world around a new portable format for printable documents, isn't this 99% Adobe's problem to solve? Or are the hooks there to make much more accessible PDFs, and the issue is that various popular generators of those documents (especially WYSIWYG ones like MS Word) either don't populate them, or perhaps don't even have the needed semantic data in the first place? For my part, I would love to see PDFs which can seamlessly be viewed in continuous, unpaged mode (for example, for better consumption on a small-screen device like a phone or e-reader). Even just the minimal effort required to tag page-specific header/footer type data could make a big difference here, and I expect that type of semantic information would be useful for a screen reader also.
    - harshreality 6y ago
      I thought flowed text in PDFs was possible, but rarely used because it removes half of the benefit of PDFs (that is, page-exact references and rendering). There already is a solution, based on html and very easy to deal with: epub. Publishers are gradually shifting to it, even for things like science textbooks, as they realize that PDFs might look pretty but they're a usability nightmare. There are still some stupid things publishers do with epubs, but they'll get it right eventually; meanwhile the main text and font settings can be overridden by ereaders.
      - thayne 6y ago
        It's been a while since I've looked at the spec but I don't remember anything like that.
        jimhefferon 6y ago
        Yes, you can reflow. https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-accessibility-features.html https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-ac...
    - roywiggins 6y ago
      Could governments insist that PDF software they buy be screen-reader friendly? If this were rigorously done, you'd have all government documents be readable by default, and then anyone else who ran the same software commercially would, too. You could also impose requirements on public companies to provide corporate documents in accessible formats- these sorts of documents are already regulated. There's various levers that could be pulled, maybe those aren't the right ones. But you could do it.
      - thayne 6y ago
        The problem is the PDF spec itself is not screen reader friendly.
        6y ago
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Folcon 6y ago
    I'm not sure there isn't a middle solution? What about a screenreader emulator? I go to a website and it offers me the ability to upload a pdf, link to a website and then shows it to me like a screenreader would. There may already be good tools that do this, but until it's super easy to see and "everyone" knows about it, then people won't think, "better just give it a quick look in the screenreader". Obviously a next good step to more adoption, is clear feedback about how to easily fix whatever issues the person is seeing...
- danShumway 6y ago
  This is one of the biggest reasons why I think that HTML is still important for general application development. HTML isn't perfect, it could be a lot better. But it goes a long way towards forcing developers to put their interface in pure text, and to do the visual layout afterwards. I think separating content from styling has gone a long way towards improving accessibility, precisely because it makes the accessibility features less invisible. I suspect there are additional gains we could make there, and other ways that HTML could force visual interfaces to be built on top of accessible ones.
fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
Is there a good library for decoding the object tree in a PDF document?
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Depends on your programming language. xpdf does a pretty good job from what I’ve heard.
- gota 6y ago
  Pdfplumber for Python
beefield 6y ago
> The worst is that so many event flyers and things, even important local government information will just be dumped online as a pdf Well, they could have uploaded it to some online service that shows the document in the browser as an undownloadable but browsable thingy (I don't even know what to call that, and I am definitely not going give any publicity to the online service by spelling out the name)
- totetsu 6y ago
  One certain online service (the one that lets you look at advertisements and fake new while you talk to your Aunt) is very popular for sharing events. On mobile they go out of their way to disable the ability to copy text. Even with the "copy" app set as my assist app, it seems to block or muck up the scrapping of text from the screen. I have to go to mbasic.thissite.com (which doesn't include all the same content) to get things in plain text. It's a real barrier to my participation in society where there are characters in the text I cant read, and I just want to copy them to a translate app.. It also made me late for a Teams based interview, as I foolishly tried to pass the join link between phones using this webpage, and couldn't copy it on the other end.
  - canofbars 6y ago
    On android or at least pixels, go in to the app switcher mode and with the app still on screen, copy the text. This uses OCR to copy and you can even copy text from screenshots.
  - rietta 6y ago
    I pretty much only access said website in Firefox with the extension that puts it in a jail. The mobile app is useless for anything but posting photos of the kids for the grandparents and aunts to see. Same app implements seriously dark patterns to get users to install their messenger app. Said chat works in the desktop web browser but not a mobile browser. I shall never install it on my phone. Mobile presents as if you have pending messages even when you don't (inbox empty on the web version).
    - 6y ago
tasogare 6y ago
I hate it too. At work we have a solution that use PDF text extraction software and the result is sometimes not great. This in turn breaks the feature I’m owning, making it hard to work reliably. Of course users aren’t aware of that, so I’m the one taking the blame :/
pnutjam 6y ago
There's probably a different format, facebook! everything is on facebook instead of the real interent, personal pet peeve...

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

The problem is accessibility features are totally invisible to normal users. Someone with good intentions creates a pdf, and it works for them. They don't use screen reader tools or know how they work so they don't even realize there is a problem.

exikyut 6y ago
And the problem with that is that the screen reader tools are $1200, because of the huge associated R&D costs and incredibly small target market. The sad thing is that the very complexity required to implement a screen reader is soley because of the technical nightmare information accessibility currently is. It's reasonable to think that "if only" everything could be made ubiquitous and everyone (= developers) could become collectively aware of these accessibility considerations, maybe there would be a shift towards greater semanticity. Thing is, though, that NVDA is open source, and iOS has put a built-in free screen-reader in the hands of every iPhone user... and not much has changed. So it's basically one of those technologies forever stuck in the "initial surge of moonshot R&D to break new ground and realign status quo" phase. :(
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  How much good would moonshot-level R&D even be capable of doing? Without realigning the world around a new portable format for printable documents, isn't this 99% Adobe's problem to solve? Or are the hooks there to make much more accessible PDFs, and the issue is that various popular generators of those documents (especially WYSIWYG ones like MS Word) either don't populate them, or perhaps don't even have the needed semantic data in the first place? For my part, I would love to see PDFs which can seamlessly be viewed in continuous, unpaged mode (for example, for better consumption on a small-screen device like a phone or e-reader). Even just the minimal effort required to tag page-specific header/footer type data could make a big difference here, and I expect that type of semantic information would be useful for a screen reader also.
  - harshreality 6y ago
    I thought flowed text in PDFs was possible, but rarely used because it removes half of the benefit of PDFs (that is, page-exact references and rendering). There already is a solution, based on html and very easy to deal with: epub. Publishers are gradually shifting to it, even for things like science textbooks, as they realize that PDFs might look pretty but they're a usability nightmare. There are still some stupid things publishers do with epubs, but they'll get it right eventually; meanwhile the main text and font settings can be overridden by ereaders.
    - thayne 6y ago
      It's been a while since I've looked at the spec but I don't remember anything like that.
      - jimhefferon 6y ago
        Yes, you can reflow. https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-accessibility-features.html https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-ac...
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    Could governments insist that PDF software they buy be screen-reader friendly? If this were rigorously done, you'd have all government documents be readable by default, and then anyone else who ran the same software commercially would, too. You could also impose requirements on public companies to provide corporate documents in accessible formats- these sorts of documents are already regulated. There's various levers that could be pulled, maybe those aren't the right ones. But you could do it.
    - thayne 6y ago
      The problem is the PDF spec itself is not screen reader friendly.
      - 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Folcon 6y ago
  I'm not sure there isn't a middle solution? What about a screenreader emulator? I go to a website and it offers me the ability to upload a pdf, link to a website and then shows it to me like a screenreader would. There may already be good tools that do this, but until it's super easy to see and "everyone" knows about it, then people won't think, "better just give it a quick look in the screenreader". Obviously a next good step to more adoption, is clear feedback about how to easily fix whatever issues the person is seeing...
danShumway 6y ago
This is one of the biggest reasons why I think that HTML is still important for general application development. HTML isn't perfect, it could be a lot better. But it goes a long way towards forcing developers to put their interface in pure text, and to do the visual layout afterwards. I think separating content from styling has gone a long way towards improving accessibility, precisely because it makes the accessibility features less invisible. I suspect there are additional gains we could make there, and other ways that HTML could force visual interfaces to be built on top of accessible ones.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago

Is there a good library for decoding the object tree in a PDF document?

colejohnson66 6y ago
Depends on your programming language. xpdf does a pretty good job from what I’ve heard.
gota 6y ago
Pdfplumber for Python

beefield 6y ago

> The worst is that so many event flyers and things, even important local government information will just be dumped online as a pdf Well, they could have uploaded it to some online service that shows the document in the browser as an undownloadable but browsable thingy (I don't even know what to call that, and I am definitely not going give any publicity to the online service by spelling out the name)

totetsu 6y ago
One certain online service (the one that lets you look at advertisements and fake new while you talk to your Aunt) is very popular for sharing events. On mobile they go out of their way to disable the ability to copy text. Even with the "copy" app set as my assist app, it seems to block or muck up the scrapping of text from the screen. I have to go to mbasic.thissite.com (which doesn't include all the same content) to get things in plain text. It's a real barrier to my participation in society where there are characters in the text I cant read, and I just want to copy them to a translate app.. It also made me late for a Teams based interview, as I foolishly tried to pass the join link between phones using this webpage, and couldn't copy it on the other end.
- canofbars 6y ago
  On android or at least pixels, go in to the app switcher mode and with the app still on screen, copy the text. This uses OCR to copy and you can even copy text from screenshots.
- rietta 6y ago
  I pretty much only access said website in Firefox with the extension that puts it in a jail. The mobile app is useless for anything but posting photos of the kids for the grandparents and aunts to see. Same app implements seriously dark patterns to get users to install their messenger app. Said chat works in the desktop web browser but not a mobile browser. I shall never install it on my phone. Mobile presents as if you have pending messages even when you don't (inbox empty on the web version).
  - 6y ago

tasogare 6y ago

I hate it too. At work we have a solution that use PDF text extraction software and the result is sometimes not great. This in turn breaks the feature I’m owning, making it hard to work reliably. Of course users aren’t aware of that, so I’m the one taking the blame :/

pnutjam 6y ago

There's probably a different format, facebook! everything is on facebook instead of the real interent, personal pet peeve...