[Athen] Editing PDFs with a Screen Reader

[Frederick, Kathryn A.]

Unfortunately, no, creating an accessible tagged PDF is not possible for screen reader users…sad but true.

Wish I had better news,

Katie

From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> On Behalf Of Robert Spangler
Sent: Friday, August 31, 2018 9:05 AM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Athen] Editing PDFs with a Screen Reader

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<mailto: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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