Will this work on the Mac?
Yes. Adobe Reader 7 has View > Read Out Loud > Read This Page Only (Shift-Command-V) or Read To End of Document (Shift-Command-B).
I mean that's what they say, that the files will talk on their own somehow through Adobe.
Preview has the same feature (Edit > Speech > Start Speaking). Either will be less satisfactory than using Preview with VoiceOver, as the latter gives you quite a bit more control.
I may be doing some training in August and they use PDFs for their training, and they say some of it is accessible in that it can read aloud itself.
The some qualifier would worry me. The Read Out Loud feature is actually robust enough to allow content authors to check their work, but the vast majority don't bother at all, and those few that might tend not to do so carefully. They check to see that the feature works, but don't compare the audio output with the text. In the Windows world, I have encountered PDFs that worked better with Read Out Loud than they did with a screen reader. That surprises me. I think it would be interesting to compare how well Adobe Reader does with this as compared to Preview as compared to VoiceOver. I have spot checked a few documents and they seem quite comparable, but I believe the matter warrants methodical investigation.
