[blindlaw] Questions about Reading Large Documents

pattischang at gmail.com pattischang at gmail.com
Fri Aug 26 13:48:47 UTC 2016


And general my opposing counsel have sent me documents in MS Word. Therefore, I am probably not the most expert with PDF documents.


Live the life you want.  Every day we raise the expectations of blind  people in the National Federation of the Blind.

Patti S. Gregory-Chang
NFBI Treasurer
NFB Scholarship Comm. Chair
Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 26, 2016, at 8:13 AM, Rahul Bajaj <rahul.bajaj1038 at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Patti,

Thank you for your helpful response.
I am assuming that by accessible copies you mean accessible PDFs. Are
you able to work with large PDF documents without much difficulty?
More specifically, are you able to use the find command in Adobe
Reader in an efficient fashion, considering that it does not work well
with JAWS? Further, it is also very difficult to copy text from a PDF
document, so that is why I generally prefer using Word documents.
Finally, have you configured Adobe Reader to read the entire document
in a consolidated fashion, or do you instead use the single-page view
option?
Your responses to these 3 questions will be incredibly useful. Thank you.

Best,
Rahul

> On 26/08/2016, Gregory Chang Patti <pattischang at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have sometimes asked opposing counsel to send me an accessible copy.  I
> matter of factly explain the conversion issues and let them know that I can
> respond more quickly if they can accommodate me.  The majority have had no
> problem doing so.
> 
> 
> "Every day we raise the expectations of blind people in the National
> Federation of the Blind.  Live the Life You Want."
> 
> Patti Gregory Chang
> National Federation of the Blind of Illinois, Treasurer
> NFB Scholarship Committee Chair
> pattischang at gmail.com
> NFB of IL: www.nfbofillinois.org
> NFB: www.nfb.org
> 
> On Aug 26, 2016, at 12:42 AM, Rahul Bajaj via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
> wrote:
> 
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I hope this message finds you well.
> I wanted to solicit suggestions from you all about the possible
> strategies that I may be able to adopt to deal with the following
> challenges:
> A. Almost all documents that I am required to read in order to draft
> any written submission in an ongoing litigation are in the form of
> inaccessible PDFs. While FineReader helps me convert these documents
> into word and helps make them partially accessible, the quality of the
> output is still not up to the mark. More specifically, I face the
> following 2 problems:
> 1. Tables in the original PDF get disintegrated into several parts
> which makes it difficult to make sense of the information that they
> contain;
> 2. Since the devil is always in the detail, it is critical to access
> specific bits of information such as the date on which a certain event
> happened, the para number of the submission of the other party, the
> precise figures that have been set forth, etc. Even though I use Fine
> Reader 11 and have tried using applications like RoboBraille to obtain
> better conversion results, the final Word Document often does not
> convey such information accurately. For instance, if I have to draft a
> para-wise reply to the other party's written submission, I need to
> know the precise para number in which they have set forth a specific
> assertion. I am unable to do so at this juncture.
> B. In a large word document, how can I quickly jump to a certain
> document that forms the subject matter of the legal dispute? For
> instance, if I have to quickly refer to a letter that one party may
> have sent to the other, how can I get to that in an expeditious
> fashion? The table of contents delineates the page numbers on which
> various documents can be found, but unlike a PDF, one cannot jump to a
> certain page number in a Word document, as far as I know. Further, the
> sequence of the page numbers also gets disrupted by the conversion
> process from PDF to Word.
> 
> Would be grateful if anyone could share possible ideas for grappling
> with these challenges.
> 
> Best,
> Rahul
> 
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