[blindlaw] dealing with PDF documents posted on the internet

[Charles Krugman]

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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