[blindlaw] dealing with PDF documents posted on the internet
Susan Kelly
Susan.Kelly at pima.gov
Tue Jul 21 19:41:21 UTC 2015
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
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