How to have a PDF read aloud in PDF by Zaweba

Listening to a document is sometimes better than reading it. Long reports are easier to take in while your eyes rest, proofreading is sharper when you hear your own words read back, and for many people with dyslexia or poor sight, listening is simply the way they read. PDF by Zaweba has a Read aloud command built in, and it works without an internet connection.

Starting it

Choose View > Read aloud and the document is spoken using Windows' own voices. These are the voices that come with Windows, so there is nothing to download and nothing to sign up for, and the text never leaves your computer. That matters for private documents such as contracts, medical letters and anything confidential from work. Many reading services send the text away to be spoken; this one doesn't.

Speed, pitch and loudness

Read aloud has settings for speed, pitch and loudness. Speed is the one most people change. A slightly faster voice suits skimming a report you know well; a slower one suits careful proofreading or a document in a language you are still learning. Pitch is a matter of taste: some voices are easier to listen to for a long time a little lower or higher than their default. Loudness lets you set the voice against whatever else is playing, so you can keep it quiet while working or louder for a noisy room.

Take a minute to try the settings on a paragraph or two before settling in for a long listen. A voice that grates after five minutes won't do for an hour.

Reading order and tagged documents

PDFs don't always store their text in the order you would read it. A page with two columns, a sidebar and a caption can come out in a jumble if it is read in the order the text was written into the file. When a document has tags, the structure an accessible PDF carries to describe its headings, paragraphs and reading order, Read aloud follows those tags. So in a well made, tagged document the voice reads in the right order, heading then paragraph, column after column.

If a document isn't tagged, the reading order depends on how it was made, and complicated layouts may come out in an unexpected order. The accessibility tools in PDF by Zaweba are where tags are dealt with, and the reflow view shows you the running text from the tags if you want to see what the voice will follow.

Proofreading, long reads and comfort

Proofreading is the obvious one. Hearing a document read exactly as written catches doubled words, missing words and clumsy sentences that your eye slides over. Follow along on screen and stop when something sounds wrong.

Long reading is another. A dense report, a set of minutes or a long policy can be listened to while you look at the figures or make notes.

And for anyone who finds reading on screen tiring or difficult, a built-in voice that works offline on any PDF with real text is a straightforward help.

Limits to know

Read aloud speaks real text. A scanned page is a picture, so there are no words for it to read until the page has been through text recognition. If nothing is read, that is the first thing to check.

The voices are the ones Windows itself provides, so the choice of voices and how they sound depend on your copy of Windows.