Reading An Accessible PDF - Dolphin Guide

Reading an Accessible PDF with Dolphin Guide

Dolphin Guide is an incredibly popular piece of AT, useful for anyone who wants to enjoy the feature benefits of a Windows PC without the accompanying headaches and complexity. My short post here is about how to approach reading an accessible PDF saved on your PC with Dolphin Guide. This is a pretty straightforward task (given a PDF document that plays ball of course but that's a whole other blog post) so let's just get on with it...

1. In the Main Menu press the 2 key to open the Letters and Documents Menu.

In the Letters and Documents Menu, press number 5 to launch the Open a PDF Document option.

2. The file navigator will open, so use the UP and DOWN ARROW keys to move to the appropriate location (such as "My Documents") and locate the relevant PDF document.
3. Pressing ENTER on the specific PDF will launch it and the reading will begin. If there is a problem with the file, in that Guide cannot read it, the speech output will indicate this and take you back to the Main Menu.
4. When you are reading the PDF you can use the keystroke of F5 or CONTROL M to switch between the different reading/viewing modes should you wish to. The three modes are as follows:
• Line by Line Mode: The default mode is to read one line at a time using the DOWN and UP ARROW keys. To read everything from the cursor on you can press F8.
• Paragraph Mode: Reads one paragraph at a time using the UP and DOWN ARROW keys. Read everything from the cursor onwards using F8.
• Magnify Only Mode: Use F12 to increase magnification and CONTROL F12 to decrease magnification of the document. Use the ARROW keys to move around the document when it is too big to fit on one screen.
5. Move between pages using PAGE DOWN and PAGE UP then, when you have finished reading, press the ESCAPE key to return to the Main Menu in Dolphin Guide.

Dolphin Guide is a great software tool, you can find more about it in the following little YouTube video: