Dear poppler developers,<br><br>I am new to this list, and working on Gnome accessibility. To read pdf document, visually impaired person uses screen reader, but very less support is provided by the opensource communities. We are working in the same line and trying to make pdf document accessible using screen reader Orca. We have analysed various options in this reagard, that includes exploration of evince document viewer, orca accessibility features for pdf document and more. As a first step, we have decided to use pdftohtml utility to provide pdf content in html format, so that orca can the pdf content available in html format. <br>
Observations while exploring poppler-0.12.4 (utils):<br>
<ul><li>Poppler-utils has a pdftohtml facility to generate html file for pdf document, Similarly with -c option it can generate the formatted html file for corresponding pdf. -c generates file_ind.html, file_outline.html, file.html and 1 .html & .png for each page of pdf. (please confirm)<br>
</li><li>While working on this file.html in firefox, we have observed that this links/contains only index file (file_ind.html) and file1.html (first page html) file. To shift to another page, I have to click on that page from index, which opens the corresponding page in new tab of firefox. So for every page one new tab will open. (please confirm)</li>
<li>I don't find way to return to previous page or jump to some particular page. </li>
</ul>For a person with perfect vision, no issues in reading pdfcontent in complex html format. But to ensure that the complex html format is as much as similar to pdfdocument displayed using any document viewer and to make html format more accessible and usable by a blind person, we found that following issues need to be resolved. As mentioned above for accessibility, now if a blind person reads file.html then following are some issues :<br>
<ol><li>Because file.html uses frameset/frame so orca is not able to shift control from 1 frame to another. it shifted after reading full content of one frame (with tab). Normal person can shift from frame to frame with the help of mouse, but with tab it is not possible to skip no. of tabs.</li>
<li>If a blind person want to read/shift to another page , it opens in new tab, it will be confusing for her/him to handle no of tabs (1 for each page).</li><li>Some more issues are there related with content format can be discussed in further communication</li>
</ol>To resolve first 2 issues, it is required to have changes in pdftohtml -c utility, that will make html document more accessible and usable to a visually impaired person. <br><br>With regards<br>Leena<br>