[Athen] Which Software are folks using for Ebook Production?

[Brian Richwine]

Hi everyone,

We processed just over 75,000 pages of print materials through ABBYY in the
past year for our students with visual impairments. Our process is
generally scanning materials in ABBYY or processing a PDF in ABBYY and then
working with the document in Microsoft Word. We've used ABBYY for years,
and actually our staff prefer to use version 9. They despised versions 10
and 11 due to changes in the ABBYY UI relating to how easy it is to set the
order of text recognition blocks. Version 12 is the first version since
version 9 that our staff will use. Our editing staff finds they have to
spend more time cleaning up the formatting that Version 12 provides than
they did in version 9 of ABBYY. Since we are interested in creating a
linear, very accessible result, sometimes you have to fight the page
formatting that ABBYY and Omnipage provide.

We try Omnipage once in a while and our editing staff report not being able
to get a word document that is efficient to work with.

Word is simply the easiest editing platform for our student editing staff
to work in, so we use it as the main editing and formatting tool for almost
all of our final alternate media types. As a tool, students are already
familiar with it so training can start from there and focus more on the
document needs than the tool. It handles multiple languages, we can use
MathType for entering math. And we can easily handle page numbering and
heading levels to provide for needed document navigation features. We've
found that our students with visual impairments prefer having complex or
large tables linearized or described instead of marked up accessibly as
tables, so the lack of good table markup features in Word hasn't been an
issue for us. This works because we make our alternate media for a specific
student's needs/preferences and not as a universally accessible document.


>From word we can output the result to Word, Daisy, EPUB, PDF, import into

duxbury braille software, print in large print, and convert to MP3. The
vast number of our clients get the word files we produce, a braille ready
file (.brf), or braille. We have a couple users that prefer EPUB so they
can access texts via their iOS devices. The EPUB works better than the PDFs
converted from word for this (reading it with iBooks or other EPUB iOS
apps).

-Brian

Manager, UITS Assistive Technology and Accessibility Centers

Indiana University – Bloomington / Indianapolis

http://iuadapts.iu.edu

(812) 856-2757 [Direct Line]

(812) 856-4112 [Office Number]

brichwin at iu.edu





On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 1:39 PM, Al Puzzuoli <alpuzz at msu.edu> wrote:


>  Hi everyone,

>

> We are currently using a version of ABBYY Finereader that is several years

> old. We are trying to decide whether we should upgrade to ABBYY 12, or

> consider other options, such as the dolphin and IRTI products. We would

> like flexibility to produce  well marked up content in whatever format the

> student requests, while still maintaining a workflow that is as simple as

> possible. I’d be curious as to what others are using, and what the

> advantages, as well as disadvantages are to those products.

>

> Many thanks,

>

> Al Puzzuoli

>

> Information Technologist

>

> Michigan State University,

>

> Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities,  120 Bessey Hall East

> Lansing, MI  48824-1033

>

> 517-884-1915

>

> http://www.rcpd.msu.edu

>

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>

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