Non Visual Desktop Access (NVDA) screen reader is fast growing popularity among visually impaired users world over. This is not merely because of the fact that NVDA is free and open source but due to the fact that it is improving at a rapid pace as well as adding new features for accessing different applications on Windows platform.

Support for Adobe PDF documents is another brilliant addition in NVDA's cap. I will not go down the history lane and talk about the NVDA version that included support for reading PDF content. I will rather focus on the level of support NVDA has for PDF documents today.

So let's start with the understanding the level of support NVDA includes for PDF documents.

Reading PDF documents with NVDA

The good part about NVDA is that it always focuses on doing the basics correctly. This is true even for PDF documents. NVDA reads dialog boxes within Adobe Reader accurately and helps users change the settings independently and access the documents with ease.

With NVDA users can navigate to different menus and toolbars using a keyboard. NVDA not only allows user to navigate to the different menus and toolbars but also identifies each one of them and the various controls available on each of the toolbar.

NVDA reads the basic documents very well, identifies different elements, such as headings, images, links, lists, and tables for users and helps them interpret the information easily. To add to this, NVDA also includes support for form elements of PDF forms created using Adobe Life Cycle.

Bookmarks generally used by visually impaired users for navigating large PDF documents to jump quickly to the relevant section are also well supported by NVDA. In addition, users can access PDF documents with the single letter Quick keys as they would do on a web page.

So far so good! But this does not mean that NVDA has no bugs while accessing PDF documents. I am so impressed with the NVDA's support for PDF documents that I will not identify them as bugs but outline them as areas of improvement looking ahead in the future.

Areas of Improvement

NVDA can certainly move ahead from here and build on the existing support. To start off, it needs to display the element list for headings accurately along with allowing users to navigate from heading to another using the "h" key.

Similarly it can also build support for interacting with forms created using Adobe Professional and identify list item bullets as well as data table headers.

To summarize the article, I will say NVDA has done a great job till now and I am sure that people working behind it will surely take the support for PDF documents to the next level.

Keystroke Reference

Following are some of the keys for reading PDF documents using NVDA:

Keystroke	Description
Insert + T	Read the title of the document
F6	Navigate between different panes within Adobe Reader
H	Move to next heading
L	Move to the next list
I	Move to the next list item
T	Move to the next table
Tab	Navigate between form controls
G	Move to the next graphic
Insert + F7	Activates the Elements list dialog box

One can also use the "Shift" key along with the Quick letter navigation keys to move to the previous instance of the element in a PDF document.

Note: In NVDA, "Insert" key is referred to as the "NVDA" key.