[blindLaw] Reviewing a financial statement and other accounting documents

Sun Jun 5 03:07:06 UTC 2022

I have the standard version of FineReader 15 for Windows. I'd assume but have no information as to whether the Mac version is comparable. In Windows at least, ABBYY re-branded a more lightweight program that used to be a stand-alone PDF editor as what you get when you open the FineReader entry in the start menu. What I'm referring to is installed alongside the standard version of FineReader and appears in the Start menu as "ABBYY FineReader 15 OCR Editor". Once in that program and once you have imported images, you can access the commands I was referring to under the "Area" menu.

-----Original Message-----
From: Justin Harford <blindstein at gmail.com> 
Sent: Saturday, June 4, 2022 3:20 PM
To: Blind Law Mailing List <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
Cc: graham.hardy at gmail.com
Subject: Re: [blindLaw] Reviewing a financial statement and other accounting documents

Great tips about the customization of templates. Would this only be in the pro version?

I have a customized punctuation set with voiceover so that it will read parentheses.

Justin Harford
Oregon Bell Academy Coordinator

> On Jun 4, 2022, at 3:15 PM, Graham Hardy via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I am not a corporate lawyer but I do have some experience in reviewing financials.
> 
> I do often use FineReader to convert PDF files into Word, Excel, or HTML, depending on my mood, when reading financial statements. There are a couple things to be aware of.
> 
> Sometimes FineReader breaks up a table as if it was in fact two individual, unrelated tables with one on the left half of a page and one on the right. It's hard to visualize what I mean by this but, to use an easy example, imagine you're recognizing a calendar of a month with the weekdays at the top. If this issue occurs, then you might get a table with columns for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, with the remaining days of Thursday, Friday and Saturday in a table of their own below. This is incredibly annoying and cannot be fixed without sighted assistance. A sighted person has to go into the image editor and delete the vertical line separator and then you usually get good results.
> 
> The program is powerful enough that, if you have many pages of the same formatting, you can create templates for how it should recognize the layout, but this can create problems of its own (e.g., if the margins of one page are slightly off, then you might get things broken up at the wrong place). I once had my assistant create a completely empty layout template that purposefully doesn't recognize tables. When I'm recognizing tables that just need to be reliable, such as corporate tax returns with a bunch of line numbers and amounts, I sometimes will put the document through this template in addition, but it only reliably generates text, and even in Microsoft Word outputs tabs instead of tables.
> 
> My only other rather important tip would be that, if you're only using speech and not braille, you should make sure you are hearing parentheses. In accounting, numbers in parentheses are negative!
> 
> Let me know if you have any specific questions.
> 
> Graham
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: BlindLaw <blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Tim Elder 
> via BlindLaw
> Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2022 9:39 AM
> To: 'Matney, Angela R.' <AMatney at reedsmith.com>; 'Blind Law Mailing 
> List' <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
> Cc: tim at timeldermusic.com
> Subject: Re: [blindLaw] Reviewing a financial statement and other 
> accounting documents
> 
> Agreed.  I've converted inaccessible .PDF files to Excel files with ABBYY.
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matney, Angela R. <AMatney at reedsmith.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2022 3:52 AM
> To: Blind Law Mailing List <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
> Subject: Re: [blindLaw] Reviewing a financial statement and other 
> accounting documents
> 
> Hello Rahul and everyone,
> 
> Justin may have more specific points to add, but my understanding with ABBYY is that it will let you save a PDF in one of many different formats, including HTML. It has been a while since I used ABBYY, but this would be standard. HTML is capable of producing tables that are easy to navigate and use with JAWS (and presumably other screen readers). I sometimes have to work with Word documents that contain several tables where a number of the table entries have check-boxes. I find that JAWS does not always seem to be responsive with these kinds of documents. Sometimes, I save them as HTML files to retain the tabular format. This is better for situations where I have to review but not edit the document.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Angie
> 
> 
> 
> Angela Matney,  CIPP/US (she/her)
> Counsel
> 202-414-9343
> Amatney at reedsmith.com<mailto:Amatney at reedsmith.com>
> 
> Reed Smith LLP
> 1301 K Street, N.W.
> Suite 1100 - East Tower
> Washington, D.C. 20005-3373
> +1 202 414 9200
> Fax +1 202 414 9299
> 
> From: BlindLaw <blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Rahul Bajaj 
> via BlindLaw
> Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2022 3:29 AM
> To: Blind Law Mailing List <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
> Cc: Rahul Bajaj <rahul.bajaj1038 at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [blindLaw] Reviewing a financial statement and other 
> accounting documents
> 
> EXTERNAL E-MAIL - From blindlaw at nfbnet.org<mailto:blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
> Justin, one question. How can one convert a file into HTML form using ABB why why? I thought ABBYY was only for converting PDF document into word.
> 
> Also, in my experience, HTML documents do not retain rows and columns in tables. They present the information contained in tables in textual form. Am I wrong on that score?
> 
> Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef> 
> ________________________________
> 
> 
> 
> 
> External Signed
> From: BlindLaw 
> <blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org<mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org>> on 
> behalf of Justin Harford via BlindLaw 
> <blindlaw at nfbnet.org<mailto:blindlaw at nfbnet.org>>
> Sent: Monday, May 30, 2022 11:33:07 PM
> To: Blind Law Mailing List 
> <blindlaw at nfbnet.org<mailto:blindlaw at nfbnet.org>>
> Cc: Justin Harford <blindstein at gmail.com<mailto:blindstein at gmail.com>>
> Subject: Re: [blindLaw] Reviewing a financial statement and other 
> accounting documents
> 
> Hello
> 
> Since you didn't get any responses from blind accountants, maybe my response might be at least partially useful, though  I'm not an accountant.
> 
> I read a lot of securities and exchange filings including statements of income, cash flow and assets/liabilities. I have found that I get decent results when I pass a PDF of one of these documents through. ABBYY, and export as HTML. I find that around 90% of the time it gets the tables correctly tagged, and it even tags headings for key sections which makes it a bit easier to navigate. Many corporate entities will have spreadsheets of their financial statements. You can usually download these if it is a public company in the USA. I have successfully requested XLS versions of financial statements from foreign companies.
> 
> Of course this would break down if the financial statements were hand written, or if you were dealing with a tax return from the IRS. It seems to me like if you are working with a high networth individual, they would be able to supply you with proper spreadsheets.
> 
> Sorry you didn't get a reply from a Real accountant. Hopefully somebody with the proper credentials will be sufficiently infuriated with my response to enlighten both of us as I personally would like to know as well.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Justin Harford
> Oregon Bell Academy Coordinator
> 
> 
>> On May 30, 2022, at 3:09 PM, Singh, Nandini via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org<mailto:blindlaw at nfbnet.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> No. I may ask again at a later time though.
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: BlindLaw
>> <blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org<mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org>> On 
>> Behalf Of Caleb E. Smith via BlindLaw
>> Sent: Monday, May 30, 2022 3:58 PM
>> To: Blind Law Mailing List
>> <blindlaw at nfbnet.org<mailto:blindlaw at nfbnet.org>>
>> Cc: Caleb E. Smith 
>> <ces2266 at columbia.edu<mailto:ces2266 at columbia.edu>>
>> Subject: Re: [blindLaw] Reviewing a financial statement and other 
>> accounting documents
>> 
>> [EXTERNAL]
>> 
>> Did you get any responses? I would be curious as well.
>> 
>>> On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 11:28 AM Singh, Nandini via BlindLaw < 
>>> blindlaw at nfbnet.org<mailto:blindlaw at nfbnet.org>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi All,
>>> 
>>> I have a more corporate-type of assignment that involves reviewing 
>>> and analyzing such classic accounting  documents like a personal 
>>> financial statement (for a high net individual) and cash flow. For 
>>> any corporate attorneys or those who know blind accountants, I would 
>>> appreciate hearing from you.
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> Nikki
> 
> 
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