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SumatraPDF documentation
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Accessibility
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SumatraPDF provides several accessibility-related features. Maturity varies by feature.

Read Aloud #

Read Aloud (TTS) — read document text with Windows text-to-speech, word highlight, playback bar, and pause / continue / stop — is documented in Read Aloud (TTS).

Screen readers (UI Automation) #

SumatraPDF exposes a UI Automation tree so screen readers (Microsoft Narrator, NVDA, and other UIA clients) can access document text on the canvas.

Microsoft Narrator #

  1. Start Narrator (Windows built-in, Win+Ctrl+Enter).
  2. Open a document in SumatraPDF.
  3. Move focus to the document canvas and navigate / select text — Narrator should read document content via the UIA text pattern.
Supported document types for UIA: PDF, XPS, DjVu (engines that expose extractable page text).
Known issue: Narrator sometimes stops reading until you switch focus to another window and back.

Other screen readers (NVDA, JAWS, …) #

Any client that uses Windows UI Automation can query the same document tree. NVDA and JAWS are not exhaustively tested for every document; feedback welcome in discussions or issues.
Tips:
  • Prefer documents with real text (not scan-only image PDFs). Scanned pages need OCR elsewhere.
  • Standard UI (menus, toolbar, TOC, bookmarks) uses native Windows controls and is generally readable by screen readers even without canvas UIA.
  • Built-in Read Aloud is a separate, app-driven TTS path — useful when you want continuous reading with word highlight, but it is not a full screen-reader substitute.

Plugin #

Accessibility is not enabled in the SumatraPDF browser plugin.

Keyboard-only use #

Many actions are available without a mouse — see Keyboard shortcuts, Command Palette, and Finding text (important for users who cannot use function keys without Fn).

See also #

Technical documentation #

For SumatraPDF developers — UIAutomation element structure when a document is loaded:
Window
 |-> FragmentRoot
     Name: "Canvas"
     ControlType: UIA_CustomControlTypeId
      |
      |-> Fragment
          Name: [filename]
          ControlType: UIA_DocumentControlTypeId 
          NativeWindowHandle: 0
          Patterns: ITextProvider
            |
            | -> Fragment
            |    Name: "Page 1"
            |    Patterns: IValueProvider
            -
            -
            |
            | -> Fragment
                 Name: "Page n"
                 Patterns: IValueProvider
When no document is loaded:
Window
 |-> FragmentRoot
     Name: "Canvas"
     ControlType: UIA_CustomControlTypeId
      |
      |-> Fragment
          Name: "Start Page"
SumatraPDF documentation
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Accessibility
md