Screen reader support

Technical Support
1

Which product are you using?

PDF.js Express Viewer

PDF.js Express Version

UI: 8.7.0
Core: 8.7.4
webviewer.min.js 8.7.4

Detailed description of issue

NVDA Screen Reader shows document as “blank”.

Expected behaviour

Screen reader should be able to see and transcribe the document.

Note that the stock Firefox viewer (which I understand to be pdf.js) does allow the screen reader to work properly.

Does your issue happen with every document, or just one?

Every document I’ve tested.

Link to document

Not available.

Code snippet

N/A

3

Hello Darren,

Could you provide a screenshot of what you see on your end? You can enable accessibility features to allow users to navigate through the user interface using keyboard navigation and screen readers like so:

Webviewer(
 {
   initialDoc: hashFile,
   path: "/lib",
   initialDoc: "/samples/files/demo.pdf",
   accessibleMode: true, // Enable accessible mode
 },
 document.getElementById("viewer")
).then((instance) => {
 // ...
});

accessibleMode is an option for the constructor.
https://pdfjs.express/api/global.html#WebViewerOptions

4

The screen-reader I’m using (NVDA) simply says “blank” when I’m viewing a document (that clearly has text in it). However, when trying to grab a good screenshot for you, I used yet a different document, and the screen reader read parts of it. So, let me work on this a bit more, and I’ll try and reproduce what I’m seeing more consistently.

Thanks for the note on {accessibleMode: true} … I hadn’t seen that, but will enable that going forward.