[nabs-l] my literature text update

[Lucy Sirianni]

Hi Ashley,

If your Disability Services office can't help (or until you 
receive the help), could you put the files on a thumb-drive and 
use your BrailleNote to copy and paste the small files together 
into one large file? That way, you could do a simple word search 
and perhaps find passages more quickly?

Hope this helps and good luck?

Lucy

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Ashley Bramlett via nabs-l <nabs-l at nfbnet.org
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Date sent: Sun, 22 Feb 2015 18:02:11 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] my literature text update

Hi all,

Here is an update on the literature text.
As you might recall, I was in the process of requesting my book 
in electronic format.
I do have learning ally version, but find half the readers to be 
hard to follow and the quality could be better.
Many of you suggested having the electronic copy so I could read 
it and navigate it to find quotes, spelling, and read along in 
class.

I have mostly bad news.
The Norton Anthology of short fiction is huge, and I sure wish it 
was on bookshare.

The good news is I was able to download dropbox and get the 
files.
They put the files in a shared folder for me.
They just left the files, no labels on them or anything; so the 
labels are a string of numbers.

But here is the bad news.
The only solution I can think of is having the dss staff put the 
files in order and label what pages are for each file.

Well the news in short is that there are so many files and its 
out of order and worst of all, jaws does not read all page 
numbers.  This makes it impossible to navigate and know where I 
am.  It is not reading all page numbers in the pdf files because 
some page numbers are at the bottom of a page.  I at first 
thought they were absent, but my dad looked at it, and saw they 
were labeled but at different points of the page.

I did not put it on a flash drive to read on my braille note, 
because I cannot navigate it.  if a professor says, turn to page 
12, I have literally seconds to do that, and would have no clue 
which file to use.

Several issues with this arrangement.
1.  With over 30 files, I have no idea which one to open to read 
a given story.
I have the title, author and page numbers for my assignments, but 
that does not help.  I cannot search this many files, and I do 
not think there is a way to search all files in a folder at once.  
I can only search one by one wich is counterproductive.
If you know of a way to search across files, let me know.  They 
are all in my folder and I will copy them to  a USB drive and 
place them in a folder called norton text.  But, I don’t think 
the pc can see all files to search them.
2.  You all mentioned copying and pasting for quotes and 
highlights of the text.
This does not work.  I highlight the text with regular key 
commands like shift down arrow to highlight a line, and then copy 
and paste.
It only copies a word or two; jaws tells me the whole line is 
selected.

3.  I cannot search by page.  This is since each file starts at 
page 1 in the computer’s eyes; like it may be 1-20 or 1-45 
depending on the size of the file.  Yes, different files have 
different page amounts ranging from 8 to about 50.
But page 1 is not page 1.  It is continuing the book.  so page 1 
is really page 222 or something like that.  I hope this makes 
since.  I may be on say page 80 of the text but when you look at 
the go to page number command, it tells you,  you are at page 5 
for instance.
4.  Some stories begin at the end of a page.  I cannot skim it.  
I cannot tell where one story ends, and the next begins