[gui-talk] [blindlaw] dealing with PDF documents posted on the internet
David Andrews
dandrews at visi.com
Tue Jul 21 19:28:01 UTC 2015
Without seeing one of the pdf's, it is hard to say, are these public files?
Dave
At 12:13 PM 7/21/2015, Susan Kelly via blindlaw wrote:
>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 GUI-Talk
mailing list