[blindlaw] dealing with PDF documents posted on the internet

[David Andrews]

Without seeing one of the pdf's, it is hard to say, are these public files?

Dave

At 12:13 PM 7/21/2015, Susan Kelly via blindlaw wrote:
>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.

         David Andrews and long white cane Harry.
E-Mail:  dandrews at visi.com or david.andrews at nfbnet.org