Are you a #ttrpg creator publishing your games in PDF format? Are you someone who uses text-to-speech (TTS) technology? Or both? Then I'd appreciate if you could spare a moment.
{thread incoming, I'll try to keep it short}

Last week, I found out that depending on what type of PDF you save your games as, people using TTS technology might be barred from accessing your games or at least have a harder time doing so. Didn't know that there's more than one type of PDF? Me neither. So let's start there.

Basically, there are image PDFs and text PDFs. Image PDFs kind of "lock" any text in the file and you can't mark it with your cursor to copy/paste it - which is possible with text PDFs. TTS technology cannot read image PDFs.

There are optical character recognition apps out there that can read text on images/image PDFs. I tried out two. It works, but it's cumbersome, and really good OCR software is expensive. - Alright, let's circle back for a second. Who uses TTS technology?

A lot of folx out there use text-to-speech for a variety of reasons, be it visual or reading impairments, ADHD, or simply the convenience of having information fed to your ears while doing something else. More on TTS technology: https://www.understood.org/en/school-learning/assistive-technology/assistive-technologies-basics/text-to-speech-technology-what-it-is-and-how-it-works

So, how can we save our games as text PDFs? The only way I know to make that work on a PC right now is to use the PRINT TO PDF option (thanks to @ClericofKord and her player for passing on that info!!). Instead of saving your game directly as a PDF, open the print interface...

...but in the printer menu, choose "Microsoft print to PDF." That did the trick - the PDF could be directly read by the TTS software. I'm not a Mac person but I assume Macs have something similar...? It would be great if you could give that a try and let me know!

Lastly, if you are using TTS and feel that this thread is missing important information, please join the conversation I will continue my research and am grateful for any input!

{the_end.exe}

PS. Please don't CC everyone I tagged in the original tweet in your answer - I just realized that might have been a bad idea