Sometimes when you open a PDF and press play, Read&Write either skips words, reads them in a bizarre order, or doesn’t read at all.
Read&Write can only read what is presented to it. Not all PDFs are created the same way, and the software's ability to read them depends entirely on how the file was built, more details are below:
1. Image-Based vs. Text-Based PDFs
The biggest culprit is usually that the PDF isn't actually "text"—it's a photograph of text.
- Text-Based: These are created digitally (like saving a Word doc as a PDF). The computer knows exactly what a "T" is and where it sits on the page.
- Image-Based: These are often created by scanners or photocopiers. To the computer, the page is just one big picture of ink. Without Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Read&Write sees pixels, not words.
2. The "Z-Pattern" and Reading Order
Sometimes the text is there, but Read&Write reads the sidebar before the main paragraph. This happens because of the underlying tagging.
- Digital documents have a hidden layer that tells assistive technology, "Read this box first, then that column."
- If a PDF is poorly formatted (common with multi-column academic papers or brochures), that hidden map is a mess, and the software just follows the "physical" coordinates it finds, which might be nonsensical.
3. Non-Standard Fonts
If a PDF uses a highly stylized or custom font, the software might struggle to map the character shapes to actual letters. Similarly, if the space between letters is too tight, the OCR might see "rn" and read it as "m," leading to those "m-words" you might hear during playback.
4. Security Restrictions
Some PDFs have "Owner Passwords" or security settings that specifically disable Content Accessibility. If the creator locked the file to prevent text copying, they often inadvertently block screen readers and literacy software from "seeing" the content at all.
How to fix it
For instant support you can use the Screenshot Reader tool on a smaller area of text. However if the entire PDF need to be read then you can use Read&Write to rescan it. Read&Write scanning runs an OCR engine over the file to "force" it into a readable format.
To do this, please follow the steps to dcan a file below-
1. Click the Scan button on the Read&Write toolbar.
2. Click the Scan from file option.
3. Drag and drop, or browse to select the file that you want to scan and select the type of file you’d like to create.
4. Click the Scan button.
5. Windows Explorer will open with the Save As option. Choose a name and location for the file.
When scanning has completed, the new file can be opened and read using the PDF Reader option in Read&Write.