I want to have the graphic symbols in a PDFdocument tagged with text so that visually impaired readers of this document can know what the graphics indicate. The graphics in question are pictures of keys on a ham radio transceiver. The company that makes the radio, Vertex Standard/Yaesu, is totally unwilling to provide this modification or reengineer the manual with proper tags, so the manual (and the radio) are pretty much useless to a blind person without having someone read it aloud. Finding a competent tech reader is also difficult. And forget printing the manual and scanning it, hoping to pick up the text written on the graphics--I tried it, no go. There? ? ? ? ? aren't more than 20 graphic symbols in the whole manual, although they are repeated many times, but I'm figuring a global replace function could handle this in an hour or two. You can view or download the manual at [login to view URL] to et a scope of the work involved. I don't think the tagging will need to be done on a per-appearance basis, unless there's something about how PDF's are prepared that I don't understand, which is quite likely since I don't prepare them, only read them.
## Deliverables
Another option might be to replace the graphic symbols with plain-text--for example, if the graphic shows the 9 key on the radio then just replace the graphic with the text "9", or whatever it says in the graphic.? The end result will be a document that, when read in either synthesized speech or Braille output, contains the full text as represented by the graphics.? ? ?