Scanned PDF's and Read Aloud tool

I support a range of students who use the Read Aloud tool in Microsoft Edge with PDF's.

Is there a way for scanned documents that are PDF's to be read aloud on Microsoft Edge? At the moment a scanned PDF will not be read aloud but a 'normal' PDF will be read aloud.

Hi Katie,
I'm Rodrigo and I will help you.
This is more complex than it looks. Scanned PDFs are like a "picture" of the document and "normal" PDFs are like a Word documents, that can't be edited.
Since it is like a picture, the "read aloud" does not recognize the characters in the picture.

A good option is to convert these files to a "readable" one there are some free services that can do that, they are not perfect, but can help.

https://ocr.space/
https://www.onlineocr.net/

If you want to know more about it, you can search for OCR on the search engine.


You can leave a suggestion to implement this feature in a future update of Microsoft Edge too, Open the feedBack Hub (Shortcut WinKey + F) and send your suggestion to implement OCR to the Read Aloud tool for PDFs.
If I helped you anyway, It makes me happy.

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Last updated March 15, 2025 Views 3,314 Applies to: