# The Ubuntu Forum Community > Other Discussion and Support > Assistive Technology & Accessibility >  PDF reader that reads text out loud (For blind people)

## mmaxx555

Hi all, 

I am a Comp Sci student, helping in an ongoing project that aims to make computers as accessible as possible to blind people.

I would like to know if there is a free PDF reader that has the above functionality, but implemented in such a way that blind people can use it easily. 

I am aware of okular's capability to speak the text, however for a blind person okular is not the right solution, as they can't select portions of the text with the mouse. Also reading a page at a time is not very helpful if they want to re-read some sentences. 

If anyone knows of a program like this or of someone who might be working towards implementing such a program please let me know. 
The people that is in the project are keen on either contributing towards the application or starting to work towards such an application. 

I will also try to contact the ORCA group for some guidance as well. 

Cheers
Max  :Smile:

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## mmaxx555

<snip>

On the plus side, I contacted the Vinux team and apparently there is someone working on a similar program, so I am just waiting on a reply from them to see if and how I can contribute. 

I am also planning on contacting the Okular and Evince team to see if they are working towards something similar. 

Cheers
Max

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## jettaknight86

Just found this the other day - http://www.nvda-project.org/

The NVDA reader. It reads PDFs. Here's a great guide to get you started: http://barrierbreak.com/nvda_pdf.php

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## mmaxx555

Hello there, 

Thought it would be good to give a bit of background on what route I actually went. 

The government of Andalucia (Spain) is funding the implementation of this kind of functionality, in between with other stuff for Evince (Gnome's document viewer).
Info on : http://live.gnome.org/Guadalinfo_accesible

As such I decided to help them so the development would be quicker.

Evince's development version has now an option that let's you navigate with a cursor, which sends signals to Orca so it can read the text out. 
There are a few bugs with the cursor but it allows for blind people to read the entirety of the document without any problems. 

This should soon be push to the stable repositories (with a bit more testing) and then be available to all distributions running the Gnome desktop environment :Very Happy: . 

Any questions, please let me know.
Cheers
M

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## jettaknight86

Sounds cool. Let us know how it goes!

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## wilee-nilee

Adobe reads out loud.

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