[blindlaw] dealing with PDF documents posted on the internet

Tue Jul 21 18:01:56 UTC 2015

Susan,

I am sorry if this has already been mentioned, but some of the settings that
need to be changed are in Adobe Acrobat and not within JAWS.  For example,
there is a setting that determines if an entire document will be made
available to JAWS or whether it will be broken into pages.  In general, if
you tell Adobe to always make the entire document available at once to the
JAWS Virtual Cursor, you probably can't take advantage of bookmarks set in
the PDF which can be useful on large documents if they are used.  Second,
there are several reading order options within Adobe.  If it is not already
specified, sometimes telling Adobe to "read left to right, top to bottom"
rather than to "infer reading order from Document" you can have better
results.  Whether these options help or not is not something I can know,
though.

Finally, if nothing above has worked or can work for you, you certainly
don't need to be printing out the entire document and rescanning it.  OCR
programs like OmniPage and FineReader contain logic that will go in and get
the text from PDF's and I believe they will grab text without doing OCR if
it is available.  Kurzweil 1000 will also create a virtual printer that will
let you print out a PDF and then have it recognized by  Kurzweil 1000.
Finally, Nuance, the company that makes OmniPage, also has specific PDF
software that is supposed to let you convert PDF's to Word for example.  The
version that I have used in the past that came with OmniPage did pretty
well.  

I hope something here is helpful, but I'm sorry if you've heard it all
before.

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

-----Original Message-----
From: blindlaw [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Susan Kelly
via blindlaw
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2015 12:45 PM
To: 'Blind Law Mailing List'
Cc: Susan Kelly
Subject: Re: [blindlaw] dealing with PDF documents posted on the internet

Been there, done that, unfortunately.  Our ADA officer is very helpful, but
he has no authority over the courts because of how are county is run, and
seemingly very limited power over our county IT, the new director of which
made a very discriminatory comment in front of an entire roomful of people
present for a meeting on the subject of the network and machinery last
month.  In fact, the ADA rep thinks I may have to resort to litigation to
get compliance from the multiple players involved, which I can neither
afford in terms of money or time.  In the meantime, my work is still due, so
I am trying to find other ways to handle this.

I will let you all know if anything improves, though!

-----Original Message-----
From: blindlaw [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Reyazuddin,
Yasmin via blindlaw
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2015 10:24 AM
To: Blind Law Mailing List
Cc: Reyazuddin, Yasmin
Subject: Re: [blindlaw] dealing with PDF documents posted on the internet

Hi Susan,
I would talk with the ADA compliance officer in the county. Make them aware
of inaccessible documents. I know that section 508 applies to federal
government but some counties do want to follow it. Website accessibility is
now part of the ADA compliance. Check the new document on the website.
www.ada.gov has a new document on state & local government guidelines. 

Let us know if you have success. 
Yasmin Reyazuddin
Aging & Disability Services
Montgomery County Government
Department of Health & Human Services
401 Hungerford Drive (3rd floor)
Rockville MD 20850
240-777-0311 (MC311)
240-777-1556 (personal)
240-777-1495 (fax)
office hours 8:30 am 5:00 pm
Languages English, Hindi, Urdu, Braille 

This message may contain protected health information or other information
that is confidential or privileged. If you are not the intended recipient,
please contact the sender by return mail and destroy any copies of this
material. 

Thank you.

-----Original Message-----
From: blindlaw [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Susan Kelly
via blindlaw
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2015 1:13 PM
To: Blind Law Mailing List; (gui-talk at nfbnet.org)
Cc: Susan Kelly
Subject: [blindlaw] dealing with PDF documents posted on the internet

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.

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