Getting started with Mote PDF
Mote PDF lives at app.mote.com/pdf. PDFs are everywhere in school: worksheets, articles, permission slips, whole textbooks. They are also often the least accessible thing a student meets, because a PDF is fixed, dense, and hard to interact with. Mote PDF opens a PDF with the full Mote toolkit available, so a student can hear it, translate it, look up words, and write on it.
Opening a PDF
There are three ways in. Use whichever fits where the file already lives.
- From the Mote PDF web app. Go to app.mote.com/pdf and sign in with Google, then browse or search your Google Drive and open a PDF directly. Nothing is downloaded and nothing is re-uploaded, so there is no duplicate copy to keep track of.
- From Google Drive. Install the Mote PDF Google Workspace app, then right-click any PDF in Drive and choose to open it with Mote.
- From a PDF you already have open. With the Mote Chrome Extension open alongside it, use the export to Mote button to bring the PDF into Mote PDF.
What you can do once it is open
Every Mote Chrome Extension tool works inside Mote PDF, so there is nothing new to learn:
- Read Aloud reads any text you select, in natural-sounding voices.
- Translation turns a passage into the reader's language without leaving the document.
- Dictionary looks up a word in place, so unfamiliar vocabulary does not stop the reading.
- Speech to Text lets a student dictate instead of typing when they add notes.
- Text Prediction suggests words as they type into the document.
- My Annotations and Screen Mask work on the page as well.
Writing on the document
Alongside the reading tools, Mote PDF adds mark-up that belongs to the PDF itself: highlighting, annotations, and text boxes. You can also place an image onto a page and add a signature. These are written into the document, so they travel with the file when you save or share it rather than living only in your browser.
If the PDF is a scan
A scanned PDF is a picture of text, so Read Aloud and screen readers have nothing to work with. Mote detects this and offers to run OCR, which adds an invisible text layer over the scan without changing how the page looks. Once it has run, the whole toolkit works, and the document can be searched as well.
See Making a scanned PDF accessible for the full walkthrough.
Saving your work
If you opened the file from Google Drive, your edits save back to Drive with the changes in them. The file a student hands in is the file they worked on, in the place the teacher expects it, with no second copy to lose track of.
Who it helps
Mote PDF is available to every student, not set up as an accommodation for particular ones. It matters most for students with dyslexia or reading delays, and for multilingual learners meeting grade-level material, but the same tools are there for the whole class on the same worksheet.
Next steps
Getting files in and out: Opening a PDF from Google Drive and Saving your work back to Google Drive.
Reading: Reading a PDF aloud, Making a scanned PDF accessible with OCR, and Using Mote Chrome Extension tools inside Mote PDF.
Working on the document: Marking up a PDF, Inserting an image into a PDF, and Adding a signature to a PDF.