If you open a PDF in a desktop version of Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader (that is, an Acrobat app running in Windows rather than in a browser), you can simply click ClaroRead’s Play button to read it aloud, with highlighting, from the current cursor position. You can also select text (with your mouse) to read it out.

Alternatively, ClaroRead includes ClaroPDF, a simple PDF reader that reads PDFs aloud as well as enabling you to add highlighting and simple annotations. You can run ClaroPDF from the ClaroRead toolbar’s Extras menu.

PDFs in a browser

If a PDF opens in your web browser, you will not be able to “click and play” using ClaroRead Windows’ Play button. You may still be able to read text aloud by selecting it with your mouse, however.

For a better experience with web-based PDFs, you can use either ClaroRead Edge or ClaroRead Chrome – both of these will read out text, with highlighting, in your browser’s default PDF viewer.

If you have trouble accessing PDFs in your browser, you can instead download them to your computer and open them in desktop Acrobat or ClaroPDF.

Inaccessible PDFs

Some PDFs are inaccessible, that is, they contain images of text rather than characters and words. 

When you can’t select text in a PDF, you can either use ClaroRead’s Scan from screen tool to read out small sections of it, or you can use the Scan from PDF / File feature to convert the entire PDF into accessible text that can be read aloud, copied into other documents, and so on.