[blindlaw] Pulling for Law Review

Sat Aug 20 14:15:33 UTC 2016

Sounds like I might be one of the few who uses Kurzweil on this list.
I rarely have trouble with OCR unless the scan is really, really bad.

On 8/20/16, Melissa Allman via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> Hi all. I also use Adobe Pro at work and  think it is more efficient and
> less clunky than OpenBook, but this is just my opinion. I will say though
> that using the OCR feature and converting documents into Word can work very
> well if the documents are clean, but many times I need the assistance of a
> human reader or someone to edit the documents for accuracy if the scan
> wasn't good and the OCR came out messy. I can't take the risk of
> compromising a client's interests because a document has issues. This
> definitely presents challenges at times. TI would be interested in knowing
> more about this Nuance program if it is more powerful though. This
> discussion is also letting me know that there are some possibly useful
> features in Adobe Pro that I am not using, so thanks. BTW I don't know about
> others but I really hate Word tables and find Excel ones much easier to
> use.
>
> Congrats to all who made Law Review. I was on a journal when I was in law
> school (more than 10 years ago now so this makes me feel old) and it was a
> very stimulating experience.
>
> Melissa Allman
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>> On Aug 20, 2016, at 2:08 AM, Karla Gilbride via BlindLaw
>> <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>
>> I can't speak about its value compared to Nuance, because I've never used
>> Nuance, but Adobe Pro also converts pdf documents to Word and preserves
>> much
>> of the font and formatting information in the process, which I never
>> found
>> to be the case with OpenBook. It converts all but very long documents in
>> a
>> matter of a few seconds and also has a lot of functionality that I use at
>> work, like combining multiple documents into a single pdf, deleting pages
>> from pdfs, reducing the size of pdfs before sending them as e-mail
>> attachments, etc. It's a pretty powerful program.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: BlindLaw [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Deepa
>> Goraya via BlindLaw
>> Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2016 11:12 PM
>> To: 'Blind Law Mailing List'
>> Cc: Deepa Goraya
>> Subject: Re: [blindlaw] Pulling for Law Review
>>
>> Just curious, how is Adobe Pro? That converts PDFs to Word as well but
>> don't
>> know how good it is compared to Nuance.
>>
>> Deepinder K. Goraya, ESQ.
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: BlindLaw [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of James
>> Fetter via BlindLaw
>> Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2016 3:25 PM
>> To: Blind Law Mailing List <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
>> Cc: James Fetter <jtfetter at yahoo.com>
>> Subject: Re: [blindlaw] Pulling for Law Review
>>
>> Yes, and it does a very good job. It sometimes even manages to identify
>> tables  and structure them as such in the Word doc, and it also does a
>> fair
>> job of picking up on fonts, including italics. It also is good for
>> scanning,
>> if you have to scan and send a properly formatted document, say, a signed
>> contract, to a sighted person, and it allows for the conversion of
>> pdf-to-word (including OCR) from file explorer (once installed, options
>> appear under the applications menu to convert pdf as document to word, as
>> spreadsheet to excel, etc). I think it's over $100, but I have found it
>> useful for a variety of things. And, as for the pdf merging business,
>> well,
>> I hope that I can change that and a variety of other things next year.
>> Out
>> of curiosity, does your journal still have people physically mark up
>> printed
>> documents as part of the editing process? Mine does, and although I can
>> obviously use the word version of the article instead, I have wondered
>> how
>> common that particular requirement is as well.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> On 8/18/2016 3:14 PM, kelby carlson via BlindLaw wrote:
>>> Interesting; that is not a requirement on my journal and it sounds
>>> very laborious. Does that software do OCR on PDFs as well?
>>>
>>>> On 8/18/16, James Fetter via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>>> For what it's worth, I always convert PDF's to Word first; it makes
>>>> navigation and copy/paste considerably easier. My law review requires
>>>> merging the pdf of the article or other source with the table of
>>>> contents for the volume/issue of the journal in which I found it, and
>>>> I would highly recommend a product (not cheap but very good) called
>>>> Nuance Power PDF Advanced. It works very well as a pdf-to-word
>>>> converter as well, sometimes better than Kurzweil 1000. I have found
>>>> that even some text PDF's do not interact very well with Jaws, hence
>>>> the strategy of preemptive conversion. Congratulations on being on
>>>> journal, and please feel free to reach out with any questions.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> On 8/18/2016 12:50 PM, kelby carlson via BlindLaw wrote:
>>>>> My team has already said they will just avoid giving me print
>>>>> sources that haven't already been scanned. I've told them it would
>>>>> probably be easiest for me to convert problematic PDFs into Word
>>>>> with
>> Kurzweil.
>>>>>
>>>>> If anyone has suggestions about using the find feature in Adobe that
>>>>> would be nice.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> On 8/18/16, Laura Wolk via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>>>>> I second everything Tai said. Except for the caveat that if certain
>>>>>> articles were very print source heavy, I simply just switched off
>>>>>> of them onto other articles. My law review team was very willing to
>>>>>> be flexible with me in that way, as they would with, for instance,
>>>>>> students who were studying abroad and so did not have access to ILL
>>>>>> or to our print library. Alternatively, sometimes I would offer to
>>>>>> check longer ranges of footnotes on articles in exchange for
>>>>>> someone else taking on my print sources. Again, this was also a
>>>>>> practice implemented for students studying abroad. I think the goal
>>>>>> is to come up with equitable yet flexible solutions.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Laura
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 8/18/16, Tai Tomasi via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>>>>>> I ran inaccessible PDFs through ABYY FineReader or similar OCR
>>>>>>> software when possible. If that did not render the document
>>>>>>> accessible, I worked with a human reader to access them.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Tai Tomasi, J.D.
>>>>>>> Staff Attorney
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> 400 East Court Ave., Ste. 300
>>>>>>> Des Moines, Iowa 50309
>>>>>>> Tel: 515-278-2502; Toll Free: 1-800-779-2502
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>>>>>>>
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>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>>>> From: BlindLaw [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of
>>>>>>> kelby carlson via BlindLaw
>>>>>>> Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2016 11:13 AM
>>>>>>> To: Blind Law Mailing List <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>>> Cc: kelby carlson <kelbycarlson at gmail.com>
>>>>>>> Subject: Re: [blindlaw] Pulling for Law Review
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I am not always the one pulling sources directly, and i'm having a
>>>>>>> lot of trouble with certain PDFs. The regular ctrl-F command
>>>>>>> doesn't seem to work right, and the JAWS find command can only
>>>>>>> search the page that is on the screen.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Also, how exactly did you deal with print sources?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On 8/18/16, jim--- via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>>>>>>> I made journal this year myself, and would appreciate any infor
>>>>>>>> you get 'r'
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>>>>> From: BlindLaw [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of
>>>>>>>> kelby carlson via BlindLaw
>>>>>>>> Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2016 12:03 PM
>>>>>>>> To: blindlaw at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> Cc: kelby carlson <kelbycarlson at gmail.com>
>>>>>>>> Subject: [blindlaw] Pulling for Law Review
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> All,
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I am wondering if anyone on here has been on law review in the
>>>>>>>> past and has pulled sources. The production team and I are
>>>>>>>> struggling to figure out an efficient process to do this with a
>>>>>>>> screen reader. Any help is greatly appreciated. I'd like to do as
>>>>>>>> much of it independently as possible.
>>>>>>>>
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