[Athen] Alt format production question

[Kelmer, Susan M.]

>PS - Susan - For the majority of students I work with, OCR'd 

>PDF files don't need to be tagged. We do cleanup in the same 

>way as with everything else, then send them a PDF. It includes 

>all the graphics, but all the student hears is the body of the 

>text, and/or anything else we might have included. The student 

>can then open the PDF and click on the Read button. Whatever 

>the default voice is, it will commence to read while still in 

>Adobe. For a blind student, we'd obviously do the tagging, but 

>then most of my blind students prefer a word doc with graphic 

>description. Jean


Makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong.  The OCR portion of the work to begin
with is almost overwhelming; marking text boxes in their right order, making
sure everything is captured, changing graphic boxes to text boxes or vice
versa, etc.  Then to make it a really usable PDF I need to check for
spelling and layout problems and code the heading styles and etc.  I don't
see how it could be a usable document unless I spent that kind of time.  And
my blind students have no use at all for PDF's that aren't 100% accessible.
They much prefer having appropriately-coded Word documents with the headers
and footers in place, all heading styles marked, etc.

Doing a 500 page book with this criteria can take me 40 hours a week for
several weeks to get done in a decent way.

And I don't have that kind of time.

Susan Kelmer