[blindlaw] dealing with PDF documents posted on the internet

[Susan Kelly]

Apologies in advance for this cross-list posting, but I am desperate to find some workable answers.

I am a county public defender whose duties include juvenile appeals.  The court websites in our county are of varying levels of accessibility, and even within those varying levels, more differences are permitted to exist because the court clerks all have different methods and standards.  When it comes to transcripts filed in the court of appeals, individual reporters upload their documents to the COA in the manner they see fit.  This will generally be in a PDF format, but it is generated by one of two proprietary programs available to them through the state office of the courts to generate written documents from stenographic notes.  These programs contain bizarre coding that, when the PDF is created within the program (as opposed to being scanned physically from printed paper) somehow is embedded in the PDF.  This causes everything from tiny blocks of the page being read in a non-sensical, patchwork fashion, to reading halting at the end of each page of the document, despite the settings within JAWS for a continuous reading experience.

So far, the only even semi-effective route around this that we have found is to physically print out the transcripts, scan them on our already over-worked scanner, and then to run them through our equally taxed OCR program, which ironically is also provided by Adobe.  Neither a print-to-PDF followed by OCR of the document nor the OCR program in JAWS itself is effective on our network for this task, thanks to peculiarities of the county network environment.  I do not have the luxury of purchasing any new or different equipment; even if I did, IT likely would not allow it to be run on "their" network.

All that being said, is there a quicker / easier solution that I am missing?  I have changed the JAWS settings countless times, to no avail, which may also be a function of our network environment.