[blindlaw] dealing with PDF documents posted on the internet
David Andrews
dandrews at visi.com
Tue Jul 21 22:20:24 UTC 2015
Recent versions of JAWS, in fact can do OCR on a screen or
document. The result may not always be quite as good as that of a
stand-alone OCR program, but it isn't bad.
Dave
At 05:07 PM 7/21/2015, you wrote:
>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.
>
David Andrews and long white cane Harry.
E-Mail: dandrews at visi.com or david.andrews at nfbnet.org
More information about the BlindLaw
mailing list