[blindlaw] dealing with PDF documents posted on the internet
Charles Krugman
ckrugman at sbcglobal.net
Tue Jul 21 22:07:46 UTC 2015
JAWS is not equipped to deal with these files in its own right. Because they
have been scanned they will need to go through some type of OCR program.
Ideally purchasing a program like Kurzweil or another program. There is a
service that I've never used called pdf2text.com that people on other lists
say works. hope that helps.
Chuck Krugman, MSW Paralegal
1237 P Street
Fresno ca 93721
559-266-9237
-----Original Message-----
From: Susan Kelly via blindlaw
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2015 10:13 AM
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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