Paizo PDFs Desperately Need Reformatting for Screen Reader Accessibility

I’m a blind tabletop player and have been an enthusiastic fan of Starfinder 1E for the setting and lore, so I’ve kind of just DEALT with the headache-inducing formatting in order to enjoy those sections of books as a player. Now that 2E is on the horizon, I hope to join the playtest and run a Paizo game for friends for the first time, purchased A Cosmic Birthday, and have found that I am going to need to do copious amounts of copy-pasting things into order in a separate document and edit out repetitive text or else do some grueling and copious note-taking to the point where I don’t even need to reference the frustratingly inaccessible module anymore—both options are a really unfair and frustrating amount of work to have to drop on top of prepping as a GM.
I struggle to express the issues I’m having without simply giving you a walkthrough of my experience trying to read this module, so I appreciate your patience and understanding. Let me try to explain the experience of reading through some of this document with a screen reader. I use Jaws, a pretty popular one for the blind community to use, but I imagine other screen reading software will have about the same experience.
Minor spoilers for A Cosmic Birthday ahead.
Let’s start on…. I think it’s about page 7. The labelling for page numbers is hard to say for sure, because of the layout and things appearing to be out of order from the screen reader user’s perspective, but let’s guess it’s page 7. The first words I encounter on it are “the market for contractors who don’t ask too many questions,” and it goes on how the PCs get Julzakama’s contact info. That’s a fragment that is absolutely not continuing a phrase from the previous page, or at least not any phrase that is encountered by using a screen reader to read this pdf straight through. We proceed reading the next paragraph or so until we get to the sentence “Read or paraphrase the following text to get the adventure started.”
The next line down, for a screen reader, is text labelled as a level 2 heading—it looks like it’s supposed to be where the reading of the page ACTUALLY starts. It is definitely not the “following text” that I’m supposed to be reading or paraphrasing. It talks about the ghost levels becoming more active as the newborn hatches from Aucturn, goes on through some of the factions and NPCs we’ll run into in the ghost levels, and then starts introducing us to Julzakama and the fact the PCs are taking a job from him when things go wrong and they’re “transported to the ghost levels.”
Next line down: Getting started. A lengthy introductory sentence about Julzakama, ending with the phrase “his credits spend just fine, and he’s always in”
Ah, so that’s where that incomplete snippet that appeared for screen readers at the BEGINNING of this page fits in. Now, there’s not exactly a convenient way for me to scroll back up to the top of this page to seamlessly keep reading that sentence. I can navigate back up to the level 2 heading that starts talking about the ghost levels, but then I’ve also got to scroll up a little further than that to get to the beginning of the page text to finish the sentence, finally being able to piece together that you’re telling me that “[Julzakama’s] credits spend just fine, and he’s always in the market for contractors who don’t ask too many questions.”
Of course, we STILL haven’t gotten to find out what exactly the “following text” to be read to the players to get things started is, but hey, we’ll get there. Alright, we finish reading that paragraph, and we’re still on the search for that information to continue this adventure running smoothly. We’re back at the end of that paragraph, back to the beginning of the section about the ghost levels again. Guess we’ll scroll down the page to that section about Julzakama that breaks off midsentence with “and he’s always in.”
Next line down from there: another level 2 heading, a footer informing me that I’m still in Chapter 1: Into the Ghost Levels. Continuing down, we have the page number 7, followed by a labelled image of the evangelist preacher.
The next 16—count ‘em, sixteen—lines are pdf document data with Paizo.com, numbers, my email, download date, and all that’s repeated at least twice each. This is a feature that I must scroll through between EVERY PAGE of the pdf. This has been a huge hassle and annoyance in every Paizo pdf I’ve ever downloaded. There’s not any way to just skip over it, since page numbers themselves aren’t headings that can be navigated to, and the text of this extraneous data is read the same as the rest of the book’s text. Let’s keep going.
Looks like we’re starting page 8! Phew! Surely, we’ll start with the text we’re supposed to read aloud or paraphrase.
Of course not, it’s more text that’s probably supposed to be at the bottom of the page. We start with “The PCs likely have questions for Julzakama.” This section continues unbroken for the rest of the interaction with Julzakama and into what the PCs might hear if they hang around the bar or check the infosphere.
We start a section called “Investigating Rumors,” and it’s conspicuously…. Not labelled as a heading for some reason, but fine. A few lines down, we get the partial sentence “In the next section, they encounter an evangelist preaching” directly followed by “A vesk in a faded tracksuit rises from a crouch, a sly grin spreading across his face—” ah, is this our evangelist preacher, I wonder? I keep reading. “—Julzakama.” Oh, naturally. Finally, we’ve come to the “following text” that I ought to be reading or paraphrasing to my players. You know, I did notice that the “come across an evangelist preaching” line didn’t have a period at the end, so that was just another break in the sectioning. Guess I will have to finally find out what Julzakama’s deal is, then we’ll get back to reading about the evangelist preacher that the players are going to encounter.
I read through the paragraph of Julzakama explaining the job to us. To finish reading that, I’ll have to scroll back up to the rest of the interaction with him that was at the beginning of page 8 for me. Then onto the Investigating Rumors section. Back to the incomplete sentence about the evangelist preacher. Back down past the beginning of the introduction to Julzakama.
Below that? Not the continuation of the interaction with the evangelist preacher, but instead I’m met with a heading declaiming a sidebar (I assume it’s a sidebar) about Complex Hazards that pertains to the elevator trap that will show up somewhere no doubt out of order on the next page.
A labelled image of Julzakama. A page number.
Sixteen more lines of “Paizo.com,” my email, download date, random numbers… keep on scrolling…… this time the extraneous header text is accompanied by the book section contents: the words “Alien Archive,” with each of the NPC names on individual lines. The page number 9. Then it has a line with “Playtesting Introduction” and lists the names of each chapter.
All that adds another 20 lines of text to have to scroll through AFTER the other pdf numbers and such. That’s over thirty lines of useless text between actual module content that can’t be skipped over easily by a screen reader.
The next page starts with the latter half of the explanation for all these suspicious rumors flying around, and then proceeds with the beginning of the elevator encounter. Scrolling on down past that, we finally get to discover that the “evangelist [is] preaching about an impending apocalyptic event,” and find the first half of the bit about the players being able to piece together rumors…
I’ve done enough explanation here. I wanted to illustrate how much work it is for me to read this module, to scroll back and forth to kludge together the inaccessible layout. The out of order text, the inconvenient headings, the extraneous text that must be scrolled through. I’d never bought a module before, only rulebooks and setting guides, and while those pdfs also generally suffer from all the same issues, they simply aren’t as necessary to have to be able to navigate quickly and in order. I’m still planning to do my best, but this seemed like the best time to try bringing up these issues as we head into the playtest.
I understand reformatting the layout is no easy undertaking, and some of these features might be out of Paizo’s hands, but the frustration for screen reading these documents is very real and I want to be able to expect better from a company that strives to be inclusive. I appreciate that images are labelled. The image description for the cover at the beginning of the book is great—I was thrilled to see the return of iconics I know and love.
The fact is that I can’t access the print editions of these books, and I am eager to consume available digital versions—but their accessibility, too, is sorely lacking.

Heya. I'm also a blind JAWS user, and I'm on the page you're discussing and not seeing the same issue. I might see two possible reasons why you're having issues, though.

First, what PDF reader are you using? I'm using Adobe Reader, which isn't the best, but I imagine outputs differently than if you were using something like Foxit, QRead, Bookworm, or using a browser, which could be leading to our different layouts.

Second, and this is a bit trickier to navigate if you're not using Adobe, but how are your accessibility settings laid out? I'm currently reading my PDF in a Tagged Reading Order, and can read through just fine, but I did notice that stuff got garbled if I tried to read it in left-to-right or raw print stream reading orders.

Edit: To be clear, these are accessibility settings in PDF Reader, not JAWS itself; as far as I know JAWS has no native PDF reading capacity.

Heya. I'm also a blind JAWS user, and I'm on the page you're discussing and not seeing the same issue. I might see two possible reasons why you're having issues, though.

First, what PDF reader are you using? I'm using Adobe Reader, which isn't the best, but I imagine outputs differently than if you were using something like Foxit, QRead, Bookworm, or using a browser, which could be leading to our different layouts.

Second, and this is a bit trickier to navigate if you're not using Adobe, but how are your accessibility settings laid out? I'm currently reading my PDF in a Tagged Reading Order, and can read through just fine, but I did notice that stuff got garbled if I tried to read it in left-to-right or raw print stream reading orders.

Edit: To be clear, these are accessibility settings in PDF Reader, not JAWS itself; as far as I know JAWS has no native PDF reading capacity.

I was indeed reading the documents in the Google Chrome browser; I hadn't encountered issues with this outside of Paizo products, but things are looking a lot better in Adobe. what a relief that this is actually as simple a fix as switching programs and tweaking some settings.

Perpdepog wrote:

Heya. I'm also a blind JAWS user, and I'm on the page you're discussing and not seeing the same issue. I might see two possible reasons why you're having issues, though.

First, what PDF reader are you using? I'm using Adobe Reader, which isn't the best, but I imagine outputs differently than if you were using something like Foxit, QRead, Bookworm, or using a browser, which could be leading to our different layouts.

Second, and this is a bit trickier to navigate if you're not using Adobe, but how are your accessibility settings laid out? I'm currently reading my PDF in a Tagged Reading Order, and can read through just fine, but I did notice that stuff got garbled if I tried to read it in left-to-right or raw print stream reading orders.

Edit: To be clear, these are accessibility settings in PDF Reader, not JAWS itself; as far as I know JAWS has no native PDF reading capacity.

I was indeed reading the documents in the Google Chrome browser; I hadn't encountered issues with this outside of Paizo products, but things are looking a lot better in Adobe. what a relief that this is actually as simple a fix as switching programs and tweaking some settings.

Glad to hear it! Yeah, I almost never use browsers myself. I've not found them very helpful at all, whether it was Paizo's PDFs or otherwise, outside of some scanning of older documents, and that's very hit-or-miss.

So the "A Cosmic Birthday" and the playtest rulebook are looking a lot better, but the PF2E player and GM core, when I try to open those in Acrobat, are registering as inaccessible pdfs, and when they get processed with its cloud services to improve the accessibility, it ends up in a document without any headings--is there a difference with these documents compared to the playtest materials?

So the "A Cosmic Birthday" and the playtest rulebook are looking a lot better, but the PF2E player and GM core, when I try to open those in Acrobat, are registering as inaccessible pdfs, and when they get processed with its cloud services to improve the accessibility, it ends up in a document without any headings--is there a difference with these documents compared to the playtest materials?

Those don't seem to have a Tagged Reading Order associated with the files. If you go to Edit, then to Accessibility, you should find a way to change the reading order. I recommend Left-to-Right Reading Order. Unfortunately I don't know how to make headings appear and tend to navigate by page, instead.

For all that I think Paizo does a good job of making their materials accessible, there is a weird stretch of PDFs, starting around the time of Highhelm I think, maybe a bit before, where the documents stopped being tagged. I've mentioned it before in a forum thread, but mentioning it again couldn't hurt.
Accessibility is one of those things that needs to keep being brought up or else it'll just slip. My guess is some of that stuff got untagged during the OGL/Remaster uproar.

So the "A Cosmic Birthday" and the playtest rulebook are looking a lot better, but the PF2E player and GM core, when I try to open those in Acrobat, are registering as inaccessible pdfs, and when they get processed with its cloud services to improve the accessibility, it ends up in a document without any headings--is there a difference with these documents compared to the playtest materials?

I couldn't tell you, but I do know that for reasons unknown the entire Pathfinder 2E product line chokes the software I use to grab images. Something hidden in the formatting, but what? I dunno.

Tiresias14 wrote:

So the "A Cosmic Birthday" and the playtest rulebook are looking a lot better, but the PF2E player and GM core, when I try to open those in Acrobat, are registering as inaccessible pdfs, and when they get processed with its cloud services to improve the accessibility, it ends up in a document without any headings--is there a difference with these documents compared to the playtest materials?

Those don't seem to have a Tagged Reading Order associated with the files. If you go to Edit, then to Accessibility, you should find a way to change the reading order. I recommend Left-to-Right Reading Order. Unfortunately I don't know how to make headings appear and tend to navigate by page, instead.

For all that I think Paizo does a good job of making their materials accessible, there is a weird stretch of PDFs, starting around the time of Highhelm I think, maybe a bit before, where the documents stopped being tagged. I've mentioned it before in a forum thread, but mentioning it again couldn't hurt.
Accessibility is one of those things that needs to keep being brought up or else it'll just slip. My guess is some of that stuff got untagged during the OGL/Remaster uproar.

Because there's no employee that have "read the forums" as a work task, it's always better to send an email to customer service. Maybe with a link to your posts about (and/or this thread). Best way to ensure your feedback is seen by the correct people.

I couldn't tell you, but I do know that for reasons unknown the entire Pathfinder 2E product line chokes the software I use to grab images. Something hidden in the formatting, but what? I dunno.

I personally use TokenTool to extract their art, it works perfectly.

And before I was using a special hand-made commandline tool thaat did it in batch, but had to extract 2 to 3 images each picture and recombine them (one bitmap, one transparency mask, and 1 rotation mask). It was also extracting a lot of "garbage". It's a slightly different problem, but both might mostly be caused by the file compression the PDF has applied internally.

Because there's no employee that have "read the forums" as a work task, it's always better to send an email to customer service. Maybe with a link to your posts about (and/or this thread). Best way to ensure your feedback is seen by the correct people.

I did that first. The thread was something I posted after my message went unanswered.