Re: Evince no longer makes PDF readable with Orca

Hi,

Le 18/02/2026 à 12:25, Jeremy Bicha a écrit :
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2026 at 5:06 AM Jean-Philippe MENGUAL
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Sid, the new evince peackage no longer enables me to read pdf files
>> with orca. The browse mode with f7 moves the caret, but no screen reader
>> feedback. atril works, but not evince.
>>
>> We dont know wether the problem is related to something not implemented
>> in Evince 49, or at-spi does not have some useful thing. Is it due to
>> Debian or upstream? The response is not easy to do.
>>
>> We plan to reportbug to evince maintainer, but I think the support of
>> a11y team is useful tu help upstream devs or maintainers of the package
>> to track the problem. Otehrwise, atril may be the appropriate choixe for
>> future debian releases where we want to have pdf readable.
> 
> If you are able to also report this bug upstream, please do so.
> https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/-/issues

OK we will dot so

> 
> It was a huge project for Papers to support the orca screen reader.
> The UI for Papers is written in Rust so it's not directly helpful to
> Evince which doesn't use Rust. Papers is basically a fork of Evince.

Indeed, after a test, I confirm that Papers works with orca. It is a 
good news, since it becomes the default pdf viewer in Debian/GNOME. I 
was not aware of this, did not know what Papers is. Now I will test it 
deeply. I just hope it will not prevent future features, in particular 
to handle PDF forms access if we manage to address it someday in orca.

> 
> I apologize for not testing the screen reader before updating Evince
> to 49. That update is already in Testing.

Well no problem, I test sid to be able to report such problems before 
they happen in stable.

Best regards,

> 
> Papers is much better maintained than Evince currently and is the
> default in recent GNOME distros including RHEL 10; we ran out of time
> and energy to make the swap for Debian GNOME 13 but the swap has
> happened for Debian GNOME in Testing. Otherwise, atril is available.
> 
> Thank you,
> Jeremy Bícha
>