Acrobat Reader's "read out loud" facility and foreign languages

[Ravensleach]

I'm drawing up an accessibility policy for our soon-to-be-relaunched web site. As a scientific organization we will probably be putting a lot of pdfs on the site and I'm researching how accessible they are.

Acrobat Reader has a facility to read pdf's in a simulated human voice. Files in English read ok. Our site will be bilingual English and Spanish and when I checked a pdf written in Spanish it sounded awful. It's as though when it comes to a word it thinks it recognizes, it makes a guess and then pronounces it with its usual accent, and when it comes to a word it doesn't recognize, it spells it.

Does anyone know what can be done about this? I suspect we need to embed a language description in the pdf document when we make it, but can't find any information how to do it. At the moment I use the free pdf995 writer (which doesn't do tables very well), may have to bite the bullet and ask for a budget to buy Acrobat Professional.... any ideas?

Thank you very much

Freda Chapman
Charles Darwin Research Station
Galapagos

 

[jmgalvin]

I'm only guessing here, but you might try downloading the Spanish version of Reader and see how that works.

Acrobat pro is very good, but you have to some learning. You might only need Acrobat standard for generating pdfs for the web. Because of your nature, you might qualify for educational pricing from Adobe, which saves a lot of money. I would check with Adobe about this.


Using OSX 10.3.8 on a G4

 

[Ravensleach]

Thank you gmgalvin. That should have worked and I feel silly not to have thought of it ... however I have now downloaded Reader 7 Spanish version and tried it out. The pronunciation is slightly better, I think, but it isn't fully Spanish as it reads numbers in English, and if the same word exists in English it reads it as English.

It also reads "y" which as you may know is Spanish for "and" as "why".

So I'm still looking for an answer.
Freda

 

[jmgalvin]

You might try looking at the program that created the Spanish text that was then put into pdf. is it the English version of something like Word as opposed to the spanish version? I'm only guessing here.

My suggestion is to go to Adobe's site and download a trial version of Acrobat. You might try the Spanish version for making the Spanish pdfs. Give it a whirl and see how it goes.

Using OSX 10.3.8 on a G4