Hi everyone,
I'm a software engineer and I'm completely blind. Like many of you, I've spent years struggling with PDFs that are difficult or sometimes nearly impossible to navigate with a screen reader.
Reading shouldn't be this complicated.
Documents with broken reading order, poorly structured tables, inaccessible layouts, and scanned pages can turn something as simple as reading an article, academic paper, or technical document into a frustrating experience.
I've experienced these problems myself, and that's one of the reasons I started developing **Lumen Vision**, a native macOS document reader designed with accessibility as a fundamental part of its architecture.
The idea is relatively simple: instead of trying to reproduce the original PDF layout perfectly, Lumen Vision focuses on extracting the document's content and presenting it as a clean, structured, readable experience.
My goal is to make reading feel more like navigating a properly structured text document, with VoiceOver-friendly paragraphs, headings, and other meaningful elements, rather than fighting with the original PDF layout.
I'm also interested in preserving useful document semantics, such as emphasis, quotations, and structure, without sacrificing accessibility.
I'm not claiming to have solved every problem. This is still an evolving project, and I know that my own experience as a blind user doesn't represent everyone's needs.
That's why I'd really appreciate feedback from other blind and visually impaired Mac users.
I'd particularly love to hear:
1. What frustrates you most when reading PDFs with VoiceOver?
2. Have you tried Apple's Accessibility Reader? What works well, and what still feels difficult?
3. How important are paragraph navigation, heading navigation, text selection, and copying excerpts?
4. Do you regularly work with long academic, legal, or technical documents?
5. Would you be interested in testing an early version of Lumen Vision and helping shape its accessibility features?
I'm building this because I genuinely need a better reading experience myself. If it can make reading easier for other people too, that would mean a great deal to me.
Lumen Vision public beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/HZt4aEEp
I'd be grateful for criticism, suggestions, accessibility testing, or simply hearing about your experiences.
Thank you!
Comments
My biggest struggle with PDFs
Hello! I'm Dan :)
First off, thanks for your attempt to tackle the issue of PDF accessibility issues.
I've used a few tools to recognize PDF files and make them readable as a totally blind MacOS and Voiceover user. Recently, I stumbled upon an app with a similar idea of making PDF files more accessible for VO users on Mack. the app is called Paperback.
One of my biggest dreams when it comes to reading PDF files is to make the tech treat it like EPUB: with EPub books, I can easily navigate the file, especially table of contents and footnotes. I'd like to have the same thing with PDFs....
Re: My biggest struggle with PDFs
Hi Dan!
Thank you so much for your feedback! I'm completely blind myself, so I understand exactly what you mean about wanting PDFs to behave more like EPUB books.
The good news is that Lumen Vision already implements both of the features you mentioned!
Document navigation: Lumen Vision analyzes the document's structure and provides a sidebar where you can navigate directly between headings and sections. You can also navigate by headings using VoiceOver, much like you would in a properly structured EPUB.
Footnotes: The reader recognizes numbered superscript footnote references and links them to their corresponding notes. When you encounter a footnote reference while reading, you can activate it to open a popover containing the note, without having to search for it elsewhere in the document.
The idea behind Lumen Vision is precisely this: rather than simply making PDF text readable, it transforms the document into a structured, accessible reading experience without trying to preserve the original visual layout.
Of course, the quality of the extracted structure can vary depending on the PDF, and that's something I'm continuing to improve.
I'd really appreciate it if you could try the public beta and let me know how these features work for you with VoiceOver.
TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/HZt4aEEp
The beta requires macOS 27.
And thanks for mentioning Paperback! I'll take a look at it as well.
Your feedback would be extremely valuable, especially since we're both approaching this from the perspective of totally blind Mac users.