Accessible Notes
How to get the most out of an accessible document — especially if you are reading one with a screen reader.
Our PDFs are tagged to the PDF/UA-1 standard, but a screen reader only reads that structure if it is set up to navigate it. If a document sounds like one long block of text, it is almost always one of three things. First, turn QuickNav on in VoiceOver: press ← and → together to toggle it — VoiceOver announces “QuickNav on” — then use ↓ and → to move through the document, and headings, paragraphs and equations are read out individually. Second, on a Mac, open the PDF in Preview or Safari rather than Google’s in-browser viewer (Google Drive preview or Chrome’s built-in viewer) — VoiceOver has known compatibility problems there and the accessibility tags are often not exposed at all. Third, for the best experience overall, use the HTML export described below.
Use the PDF when you need a standards-compliant file to hand in, share or archive — it is tagged to PDF/UA-1 with alt text on every equation and figure. Use the HTML export when someone is actually going to sit and work through the maths with a screen reader: it lets them navigate inside an equation instead of hearing the whole thing at once, and it behaves consistently across screen readers and platforms.
Every equation carries a written-out spoken description, so a screen reader says “the integral of x from zero to one” rather than reading symbols or skipping the equation entirely. Figures and diagrams get alt text describing what they show, not just what they look like. You can edit any of these descriptions during review before the final document is generated.
The AI does a first pass over your handwriting, then you review and correct it before anything is generated. Nothing is published without you seeing it first — the review step exists precisely because handwriting is hard and getting the maths right matters more than speed.
Maths, physics, chemistry and computer science. Choose the subject before you upload and the transcription adapts to it — chemistry gets proper chemical notation, computer science preserves code formatting, and so on.
Only upload documents you have the right to use — your own notes, or material your institution has given you permission to convert. Do not upload copyrighted material you do not have permission to reproduce, such as scanned textbook pages or publisher-owned worksheets. Uploads that appear to contain copyrighted material are blocked automatically and will not be processed.
PDFs up to 50 MB and 100 pages. The file must be a real PDF, not password protected. Most documents finish in one to three minutes depending on page count.