@pixelate@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@mcourcel But making accessible PDFs is possible! All you need is fifty thousand hours of training directly from Adobe, two software packages nobody has ever heard of before, and for making accessible pdfs to be your full time job. Either that or you could just hire one of the people from the thousands of ads I get in my Linkedin messages every day from companies nobody has ever heard of who specialize in pdf remediation.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@mcourcel And then I take those PDF's and either convert them to something else or run them through AI if they're image ones. Of course if I have to make them accessible PDF's I just use Word to save as PDF or something. I wish the format hadn't been invented and people used EPUB for readonly files. Or HTML. Or something.
@pixelate@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@mcourcel PDF's aren't bad if you have a truly accessible way to read them, and Paperback does that for me anyway! I've only hit it with a few PDF's so far but it presented the information just fine when Chrome couldn't even open them. Granted, I don't know if any of them contained images and how it handles those cases, but I bet somebody in this thread does!
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@mcourcel No it can't, and I have mentioned that to Quinn but also pointed out that it wouldn't strictly be a reader anymore, but they would still be very useful features and don't think I got a response so maybe they're just busy with other features and life and will get around to it at some point.
@fastfinge@GamingWithEars@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@mcourcel And, a PDF reader that can also fill out forms is a fundamentally different kind of user interface than the one implemented by Paperback (and Christopher Toth's QRead before it). Realistically, for anything besides Acrobat/Adobe Reader or Chromium itself to do it accessibly, it would probably entail an embedded web browser engine and converting PDF to HTML rather than a single text edit control.
@matt@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel This is also why none of the accessible open source ebook readers support Math content, or cope with footnotes and endnotes correctly. Modern ebooks really, really need to be loaded in an HTML webview. The issue is that I want continuous reading, and none of the HTML implementations like Thorium support that.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel By continuous reading, do you mean fine-grained saving of your position in the document, or something else? If the former, then yes, the fundamental problem is that Windows screen readers don't allow the application to know precisely where the virtual cursor is located. I ran into that in Serotek's DocuScan Plus; I had committed to an HTML view, then could only do bookmarks approximately.
@matt@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel I mean that I want to press NVDA+down arrow, start reading, and not have to press next page or next chapter constantly. But doing that requires loading the entire book into the HTML webview control, and now you get massive lag for various API related reasons. You can't do some sort of autoscroll to load content as you need it, because screen readers doing say all don't always update the focus position correctly, so you can't tell when they're about to hit the end of the currently loaded content. This is a thing I've thought about, and chatted with some folks about over coffee/beer.
@matt@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel IMHO those are larger problems than bookmarking. We can get close enough (nearest paragraph) bookmarking in a webview. And that would be fair exchange to have working links, footnotes, endnotes, media, math content, and all the rest. But I can think of no way with current screen readers and API's that we can do autoscroll. Kindle manages it, but they're doing...something custom that I don't know anything about. And I'm just not willing to give that up.
@matt@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel Nope. Direct TTS output is available if you want that. But both NVDA and jaws present kindle ebooks in some sort of custom virtual buffer. It supports pressing enter on links, autoscroll during say all, etc.
@matt I've honestly been afraid to look at it too close. Kindle Cloud broke accessibility because people started using it as a way to remove Kindle DRM now that the other popular methods don't work. If I wanted too, it would be pretty easy to create a new synth driver for NVDA that uses say all as a way to extract the text from a Kindle book. Here's the current technique they're using, if you're curious: blog.pixelmelt.dev/kindle-web-drm/
