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The Accessibility Setup Assistant
Opening image only documents
Most image only documents are created by authors who placed a printed page through a
scanner and saved the resulting image as a PDF document. Although text may appear on the
screen, it is only a picture of text without the underlying characters needed by JAWS.
When you open an image only file, Adobe Reader treats it as an untagged document, and presents the
dialog to start the tagging process. Even after tagging the file will still be inaccessible to screen readers.
Note for JAWS and Window-Eyes users regarding image only documents:
When Adobe Reader completes the tagging process, the image of the file appears, and JAWS and Window-
Eyes will report, "Alert, empty document. " Your screen reader will not be able to read anything in the
file, and all keystroke navigation attempts will result in the same message, "Alert, empty document. "
If you need access to the information in an image only PDF, you can use the PDF recognition features found
in certain brands of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. You can also use the OCR features
of Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional to convert an image file to readable text. The quality of the
results produced by any OCR tool will vary depending on the complexity of the original document and
the clarity of the image. In some cases, you may need sighted assistance to read image only documents.
Opening untagged documents
When you open an untagged PDF document using a screen reader, a dialog box appears to notify
you that the document is untagged and must be prepared for reading. The notification includes a
reminder that assistive technology will not be able to interact while the document is being analyzed
and tagged. Additionally, the number of pages in the document is provided, so you can estimate the
relative duration of the tagging process. After this introductory information, your screen reader will
inform you that you are in a combo box for choosing the reading order, and that you are on the first
of three choices. The recommended option, labeled "Infer reading order from document, " works best
for most documents. For some documents, however, you may find that one of the other choices works
better. The other choices are "Left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading order", and "Use reading order in
raw print stream". You can use the Up Arrow and Down Arrow keys to select one of these options.
Accessing PDF Documents with Assistive Technology
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