[nfbcs] Looking for an accessible way to read financial statements

[David Andrews]

First, as an old-timer, I think you should not think of use of a 
human reader as "resorting."  There was a time, not that long ago, 
when this was a student's major tool.

Secondly, do you know the table-reading commands in your screen 
reader?  If so, these may help you -- or they may not, if the tables 
weren't coded properly.

Dave

At 05:49 PM 4/15/2017, you wrote:
>Hi all,
>I am taking an accounting class, and we are doing a project in which 
>we are analyzing and comparing the financial statements of two major 
>corporations. It seemed that Google finance was pretty accessible, 
>but the information was in a table and there were four different 
>values for each item. I'm supposed to compare two consecutive years. 
>essentially was not able to decipher which numbers corresponded with 
>the respective values. I also found some pdf documents of the 
>statement of cash flows, balance sheet, and income statement on the 
>corporation's web site, but I was not able to make much sense of 
>them either. Thus far, I have had my accounting book produced in 
>Braille, and the brailleest did quite a good job in transcribing 
>them in a way that I was able to grasp. I have also used excel to 
>complete homework assignments. However, trying to access actual 
>statements of of a company seems much more challenging. I may just 
>have to resort to using a human reader, but I would appreciate any 
>advice from anyone who has experience with this.
>Thank you