Reflow and high contrast page colours in PDF by Zaweba

A PDF is meant to look the same everywhere, which is its great strength for printing and its great weakness for reading. The page is fixed. If the type is small, you zoom and scroll sideways. If the colours are hard on your eyes, you squint. PDF by Zaweba has two accessibility views that loosen that grip a little without changing the document at all: reflow and replaced page colours.

Reflow

Reflow, on Ctrl+4, shows the text from the document's tags as running text. Instead of the fixed page with its columns and margins, you see the words flowing in one column that fits the window. Make the text bigger and the lines wrap to fit, with no sideways scrolling.

This is a real help on a small screen, or for anyone who needs large text. A two-column report that is miserable to read at 200 percent becomes comfortable once reflowed, because each line fits the width of the window however large the type is.

Reflow depends on tags. Tags are the structure an accessible PDF carries to describe its headings, paragraphs and reading order. A well made, tagged document reflows cleanly. One without tags has nothing to reflow from, so this view works best with documents that were made with accessibility in mind, such as many government, university and corporate publications.

Reflow is also a quick way to check a document's tags. If the reflowed text comes out in a sensible order, headings before their paragraphs, columns one after another, then the tags are doing their job. If it jumps about, the tags need attention, and screen readers and the Read aloud command will stumble in the same places.

Replace page colours

Some people find black text on bright white hard to read for long. Others need much stronger contrast than a designer's pale grey on cream. Replace page colours swaps the document's colours for a colour scheme, including high contrast schemes, so you can read in the combination that suits your eyes.

The change is on screen only. The file is unchanged, so you can read a document in high contrast and send it on, or print it, exactly as it arrived. That makes it safe to leave on for everyday reading without any risk of altering the document.

It also helps in dim rooms, where a full white page can be glaring, and for long sessions where a softer scheme makes reading less tiring.

How the two fit together

The two views solve different problems. Reflow deals with layout: small text, columns, sideways scrolling. Replaced colours deal with contrast and glare. Many readers use both at once on a long document.

They sit with the other accessibility features in PDF by Zaweba. Read aloud speaks the text, following the same tags reflow uses. The accessibility tools can make bookmarks from headings. And the app can follow the Windows light or dark theme for the program around the page.

The thinking behind them

A PDF belongs to whoever made it, and its look is usually deliberate. These views don't try to change that. They give the reader a different way to see the same words, for as long as they need it, and leave the file untouched. Reading should adapt to the reader, and with these two views it can, without anyone having to make a second, accessible copy of the document.