PDF scanned but able to hear the words
Betsy Grenevitch
I am not sure I gave the right subject line. Let me try to explain the situation.
I have been having difficulty with some PDF files especially when I put them on the notetaker. It happens even when making them into Word files.
I spoke with Microsoft disability about this and they said that even though it is reading to me it is an image file. I am not sure if I Love PDF converted it or not but do not believe so. They are saying I need an OCR program to read it. I know you all have recommended a program in the past for a scanned image that I am not able to read at all thus the reason I have I Love PDF but it is not working the same now. I am even getting letters with these kinds of files now. Any ideas.
I thought it was interesting that he did not remember I was not using JAWS as JAWS has a built-in OCR program. Has NVDA thought about doing something like this or is it already there and I just do not know about it.
What can I use to read a PDF image file where the words are already reading to me. The problem is when I read it on the Sense that it jumps lines and it may be doing it when reading it on the laptop as well and I do not even realize it. When on the Sense and I read one line when I go down to the next one it is not ;the next line that it should be but I have to go down two or three lines on the display to get the line that should be next.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Betsy Grenevitch 678-862-3876
Snehashish Mahato.
Which file format are you converting them from into .pdf?
I try to avoid .pdfs as much as possible. If I ever do come across such a file, I use
ScribeMe
(which works brilliantly on Android and probably on iOS as well).
It does have some limitations, so I have to take a few extra steps as well.
HTH,
Snehashish.
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Gene Asner
There is an add-on, perhaps more than one, that will do this, but I doubt it's accuracy is as accurate as the JAWS PDF conversion. I don't use those add-ons and I can't tell you more about them. he add-ons use open source free recognition software and such software isn't as good as paid for OCR software. OCR requires a lot of work on the part of developers and much more staff than free OCR programs have to design them to get the kind of results you get with JAWS.
I'll discuss how to use a free JAWS demo to convert an image file to text, if you want to try doing so.
Gene
Rui Fontes
Hello!
NAO NVDA Advanced OCR uses Windows OCR engine.
TesseractOCR uses Tesseract OCR.
Normally both have very good results scanning a PDF file.
Best regards,
Rui Fontes
NVDA portuguese team
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Mujtaba Merchant
If you have Gemini installed, upload the PDF and ask it for the contents of the file and see if this helps. Once you have the contents you can copy and paste them in word or notepad and read them as any document.
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Gene Asner
recognized text. I've hardly done this and I'm not sure how it compares
with JAWS OCR, but the little bit I played with it appeared to give good
or reasonably good results.
Supposedly according to an AI bot I asked about this, the recognition
occurs on your machine and information isn't sent anywhere, but I'd want
to verify that with a traditional Internet search on the subject before
using it for anything I wanted to be sure is private and at times, I
simply don't want to make things available to possibly be seen even if
there is no reason they shouldn't be.
To have a document displayed in Chrome, if it is on your machine. be on
the name of the document when you are in the list of files where it is.
Open the context menu and type h. move up and down the choices and
press enter on Chrome.
Gene
On 1/26/2026 9:36 PM, Mujtaba Merchant wrote:
> If you have Gemini installed, upload the PDF and ask it for the contents
> of the file and see if this helps. Once you have the contents you can
> copy and paste them in word or notepad and read them as any document.
>
> *Rui Fontes
> *Sent:* Tuesday, January 27, 2026 1:00 AM
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> *Subject:* Re: [NVDA] PDF scanned but able to hear the words
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Steve Nutt
I get an announcement sometimes that Chrome couldn't download the text extractions or something like that. It's not a static error, but it leads me to think that maybe it isn't completely offline.
All the best
Steve
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