If you’ve opened a pdf document and the buttons on the PDFaloud toolbar are greyed out, this is due to the security settings on the pdf document. Some publishers will protect the content of their document. This means PDFaloud can’t access the text in the document.
To read these documents, the Screenshot Reader feature of Read&Write should be used. A video tour which shows more information on using the Screenshot Reader feature can be found at the bottom of the drop down list beside the Screenshot Reader button.