On: What's so hard about PDF text extraction?

[IncRnd]

Adobe Reader has an option to Read Aloud PDF files. I don't know how well or poor that works, but I'm writing this comment just in case you were not aware of that function.

[z3t4 → IncRnd]

The problem is that you cant parse PDFs reliably. Half of the time they are just bitmap images from a scanner.

[jlokier → z3t4]

Some Word documents are like that too! Can't blame the PDF format if the source material is a bunch of scans.

[daveFNbuck → z3t4]

html/css has a similar problem. A lot of my email is just a collection of images that contain text.

[franga2000 → daveFNbuck]

I absolutely hate those, but the HTML spec does require the alt attribute which is actually used in practice quite commonly.

[daveFNbuck → franga2000]

I've never read the HTML spec directly until checking it now to verify your comment. I usually use MDN, which says that the alt attribute is not mandatory. [1]

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Im...

[bregma → daveFNbuck]

Non-conforming email should be filtered by the scam filter before it ever gets to your MUA.

[daveFNbuck → bregma]

What is that email not conforming to?