[blindlaw] dealing with PDF documents posted on the internet

[Susan Kelly]

Not really - they are loaded within the case files on the Court of Appeals website (Arizona Court of Appeals, division 2 http://www.apltwo.ct.state.az.us/apl2.cfm  ), but because I have to first log-in to my e-filer account and then select "view case docs" to access them, my guess is that they are not.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Andrews [mailto:dandrews at visi.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2015 12:28 PM
To: Blind Law Mailing List; Blind Law Mailing List; (gui-talk at nfbnet.org)
Cc: Susan Kelly
Subject: Re: [blindlaw] dealing with PDF documents posted on the internet

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