Sensory Readable reads PDF documents aloud with the same controls you use everywhere else. This works in Adobe Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Edge, Chrome’s built-in viewer and other PDF viewers, and it includes scanned PDFs.

Video help

These short walkthroughs show Readable speaking a text PDF and a scanned PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Read PDFs aloud in Adobe Acrobat Reader: start anywhere, read whole passages and lists, and move through the document.
Readable speaking a scanned PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Text PDFs

Most PDFs contain real text. To read one aloud:

  1. Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader or another PDF viewer.
  2. Click where you want reading to start.
  3. Press F7 or click Play on the Readable Toolbar. Readable carries on to the end of the text, or until you stop it.
  4. Press Ctrl or F7 to stop.

You can also use Hover Read, Ctrl+Space to read to the end, and Speak on Select.

Scanned PDFs

A scanned PDF is a picture of the page, so there is no text behind it to select. Readable recognises the text on screen with Smart Dynamic OCR automatically, so Play, Ctrl+Space and Hover Read still work.

  • To read one area of the page, such as a table or a caption, use Text Extractor.
  • To make a scanned PDF permanently accessible, or save its text as an RTF or DOCX file, use PDF Convert.

Exam papers

For exams, use Sensory PDF Reader, the computer reader included with Sensory Readable Suite. It is JCQ compliant for exam access arrangements.