[Athen] Editing PDFs with a Screen Reader

[Robert Spangler]

Hello:

I am in charge of our alternative formats program.  As a screen reader
user, I do not find Adobe Acrobat Pro or Abbyy Finereader to be the most
accessible.  I find them laggy, they sometimes freeze and I have not found
a way to edit PDFs directly.

Is this possible for blind folks to do with a screen reader?  Ultimately, I
need to be able to remediate PDFs.  I would like to do tagging, edit the
text, do chapter breaks, etc.  I know I can do chapter breaks especially if
there are bookmarks in the PDF, but I find this difficult to do, to
determine the page numbers easily, if there are not bookmarks.

Normally, we have student workers who handle the editing and I just do the
administrative stuff, such as sending out the texts.  We have summer
classes, though, when the student workers are not here, so this task
ultimately falls to me!

I would love to hear from people, especially blind people, who are working
with remediating PDFs.  Is this possible?  Are there accessibility problems
with these programs?  Admittedly, I've just accepted that most PDFs are not
always edited adequately and I deal with it, but I don't want to tell my
students this.  Haha.  I usually run it through OCR and that's sufficient
for me except for when the order of the reading is incorrect.

Looking forward to responses.

Robert


-- 
Robert Spangler
Disability Services Technical Support Specialist
rspangler1 at udayton.edu
Office of Learning Resources (OLR) - RL 023
Ryan C. Harris Learning & Teaching Center (LTC)
University of Dayton  | 300 College Park  |  Dayton, Ohio 45469-1302
Phone: 937-229-2066
Fax: 937-229-3270
Ohio Relay: 711 (available for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing)
Web Site: http://go.udayton.edu/learning
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