61. Have Acrobat Read a Document Aloud Before You Begin  60 Create an Accessible PDF
See Also  63 Set Automatic Scrolling
One of the many wonderful accessibility features of Acrobat is the ability to have your documents read to you. The Read Out Loud command reads the selected page or the entire document, depending on which option you choose. The voices used are the ones on your operating system. You can get a variety of voices depending on your operating system vendor. For example, the Macintosh OS has a variety of voices to choose from as a standard. The Windows operating system has a more limited range of voices from which to choose. If the PDF you are having read is tagged, the Read Out Loud command reads the document in the tagged structured reading order. If the file is not tagged, the page or document is read from top to bottom and left to right. | 1. | Read a Document Out Loud From the View menu, select Read Out Loud, Read This Page Only . This reads the entire page rather than the whole document. Because all we want to do at this point is get a feel for how the document sounds when read aloud, one page is more than adequate. To stop the reading before the page ends, select the Stop command (also located in the Read Out Loud submenu of the View menu) or press Ctrl+Shift+E (Windows) or  +Shift+E (Mac OS). To pause the reading, select the Pause command (again, located in the Read Out Loud submenu of the View menu) or press Ctrl+Shift+C (Windows) or +Shift+C (Mac OS). | | 2. | Choose a Different Voice Macintosh users are given a wide variety of voices from which to choose. To pick a different voice from the default one, select the Reading tab from the Preferences dialog box. The Preferences command is listed in the Edit (Windows) or Acrobat (Mac OS) menu. TIP  | Some of the voices you can access are rather funny , but be sure to pick a voice that is easily understood . The whole point of having Acrobat read a document aloud is to make it easier for people with visual impairments to access the information in your document. | In the Reading tab, uncheck Use Default Voice . Then select a different voice from the Voice pop-up menu. To hear each one, you must select it in the Reading preferences first and then select the Read This Page Only command from the Read Out Loud submenu of the View menu. An ideal way to hear the various voices is to use the Pause command to pause the reading, select another voice, and then continue the reading.   | | 3. | Change the Reading Speed
Now that you have heard the default voice and other voices, you might want to slow down or speed up the reading speed by increasing or decreasing the reading words per minute. Select the Reading tab from the Preferences dialog box to change the speed and pitch. Uncheck Use Default Speech Attributes . Select a different Pitch (a higher or lower voice) from the pop-up menu (a higher number means a higher-pitched voice). Change the Words per Minute to a lower number for slower reading or a higher number for faster reading.
|  |
