[blindLaw] Other PDF OCR options and question re NVDA

[Áine Kelly-Costello]

 Hi all, 

A couple things: 

1. Two other OCR options not yet discussed (I don't think) 

RoboBraille - this is online and free, I used it through uni. Not perfect but not bad either - if has a very good go at retaining a lot of formatting. (Sometimes you do need to set the text language to whatever it was supposed to be after the conversion).  Sometimes it retained page numbers, sometimes not. You can email convert at robobraille.org with a single file at a time and the format you want (e.g. docx) in the subject line. I was reading the user guide and it looks like you can ask it for a (tagged) PDF by putting PDF in the subject, though I've not tried this. Or you can upload multiple documents of the same type here: 
https://www.robobraille.org/convert-file


I was also having a play around just now with the KNFB Reader app (on iphone) which I hadn't touched in ages but it looks pretty intuitive to me. No idea what its preservation of page numbers is like. You can export in txt, html or rtf. My guess is that this will not do anything that getting adobe to convert the file and emailing it to yourself on gmail to generate an HTML document wouldn't already do. 

2. On another note, if anyone's put any effort into reading tagged but long PDFs with NVDA, would you kindly share your experiences? I've not needed to read difficult docs like this for a while but will very likely do soon (for an  investigative journalism course,  not law, but similar issues will probably come up). 

Thank you, 

Áine