How-to: Adobe Acrobat Reads for You

Here is a great tip from the Colorado Bar Association weekly e-newsletter on a tool in Adobe Acrobat Reader. Reba Nance, Director of Law Practice and Risk Management at the Colorado Bar Association, has given me permission to pass her tip along to you.

*** Tip of the Week: Let Adobe Acrobat Reader Read Your Document Aloud!

Personal Document Format (.pdf) is used extensively in law firms, the courts and on websites. If you have Acrobat Reader (or the full version of Acrobat) 6.0 or later, you may be able to have your computer read your document out loud. You need to have your computer connected to speakers and the volume turned up. This is a great tool for proofreading or listening to your document for readability. Here's how:

- Open a document in .pdf format
- Go to the toolbar at the top of the document and click on "View" and then "Read out Loud"
- Choose "Read This Page Only" or "Read to End of Document"
- A special toolbar may appear, with buttons for you to click "Pause" or "Stop"

You can set your preferences for volume, voice, speech attributes and reading order:
- Go back to the toolbar at the top of the document and click on "Edit" then "Preferences" and then "Reading"

You may be able to choose from three different voices. There also are websites from which you can download other voices (which won't sound so much like HAL from 2001 Space Odyssey).

Contact Reba Nance, reban@cobar.org or (303) 824-5320, with questions.

After experimenting a bit, I found that this tool works best for PDF files that are mostly text. Forms are hit and miss. Files that are images (might look like text but is really a scanned image) will not be read at all. And the "Microsoft Sam" voice really did sound like HAL.