Google Chrome's PDF viewer is gaining the ability to convert images to text

PDFs are astonishingly useful documents, but some are lazily created. You've almost certainly encountered a PDF file that comprises images of text rather than selected text. This is a serious annoyance if you were hoping to copy text into another document, but it's also a major problem for anyone who is reliant on text-to-speech tools to have document read aloud to them.

Google has some good news for users of Chrome; the browser is gaining the ability to convert images to text in PDFs, OCR-style. There is some bad news, however. This incredibly useful feature is -- at least initially -- not going to be made available to everyone.

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Google made the announcement ahead of the ISTELive 23 educational technology exhibition as the company updates the accessibility tools built into Chrome. Having previously made the reading mode tool -- which can be used to increasing the size of text and change the font of PDF to improve legibility -- exclusive to the ChromeOS version of Chrome, it is now going to be making its way to all editions of Chrome.

But the new OCR treatment for image-based PDFs is arguably of greater interest. Google says of the upcoming feature: "With PDF OCR technology, screen reader users will be able to convert images to text for PDFs in Chrome browser on ChromeOS".

Going into a little more detail, the company says:

In 2019, we launched get image descriptions so users could get descriptions of unlabeled images on Chrome browser. Today, we're building upon that capability, and adding even more functionality to PDFs. We're adding the ability to convert images to text for PDFs in Chrome browser on ChromeOS. This means that when a screen reader user comes across a PDF that does not have alt text (a description of the image embedded and readable by screen readers), the screen reader will be able to convert the image to text and read it aloud. Reading mode and image to text will both begin rolling out in the coming months.

As Google points out, this incredibly useful feature will only be available to users of the Chrome under ChromeOS, although it is likely that this exclusivity will eventually come to an end. The reading mode feature was ChromeOS-only for around four months, and it is reasonable to assume that PDF image-to-text conversions will also be made available to all Chrome users in the end.