Hello everyone,
I recently purchased an online course a few months ago, in which i was sent a series of pdf manuals. The problem is that when I try to open these manuals, voice over reads them in a really weird way, without anything I would expect to be contained in these documents! I don’t know if this is a problem with the documents themselves, or if there’s something within these files that is not fully compatible with VO? Either way, this is most frustrating as I’ve never known this to happen before, and I was very much looking forward to working through this course! Any help with this would be very much appreciated?
By Diamond tears, 20 August, 2022
Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Comments
Image PDFs?
Do you know if the PDF files are scans of printed text presented in an image? In order to access such documents with VoiceOver, you'll either need to use VoiceOver's built in image description feature to extract text out of the document, or use a third-party OCR app like Voice Dream Scanner to extract the text and export it as a new accessible document.
HTH
Yes I think these might be…
Yes I think these might be pdf images. Sorry if this sounds like a silly question, but how would I extract the text with the in-built VO image description?
VoiceOver image descriptions
Enhanced VoiceOver image descriptions can be turned on by going to Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > VoiceOver Recognition > Image descriptions, and enabling the "Image descriptions" toggle. Once the resources have been downloaded, focusing on an image will cause VoiceOver to analyze and attempt to describe it, which should include any text detected in it. However, your individual results will vary based on the quality of the image and the processing power of your device.
HTH
So I’ve now got the image…
So I’ve now got the image descriptions turned on, but they’re still not reading proper. It just reads the files like a series of numbers, punctuations or other symbols! I really don’t understand it … I have never had this issue with pdf documents before?
Ask them for a text file format
I've had similar problems in the past. The best solution I've found is to obtain the same documents in text file format, or word, or pages from the source.
Good luck!
Bruce