Abstract
Documents in portable document format (PDF) that have no accessibility tree are inaccessible by screen readers. Such documents, rendered as images, cannot be searched through or interacted with, and their textual elements cannot be selected or copy-pasted. This disclosure leverages optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically recognize inaccessible text content in scanned PDF documents and to enable access to such documents via screen readers, select-to-speak tools, and/or other assistive technologies. Upon recognizing text in the scanned document, an accessibility tree is generated and an invisible text layer is overlaid, enabling reading aloud (via a screen reader), searching through, selecting-and-copying elements from, and interacting with the scanned document. A previously passive image of a document achieves the qualities of an editable document or a searchable webpage that supports copy-paste and other text-related operations. In addition to widening accessibility, the described techniques are useful to those who prefer to consume content aurally rather than visually.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Bernal Castano, Jonathan Ray; Halavati, Ramin; Tseng, David; Lee, Kyungjun; Yan, Jason; Ley-Wild, Ruy; Paisios, Nektarios; Bissacco, Alessandro; Kulkarni, Sameer; Zhang, Lei; Payne, Jennifer; and Yang, Chu- Hsuan, "Transforming Inaccessible PDF Documents into Accessible, Interactive Documents", Technical Disclosure Commons, (February 06, 2025)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/7818