[Athen] Editing PDFs with a Screen Reader

[Andrea L. Dietrich]

In Acrobat Pro 2017, it’s under “Tools, Organize Pages, Split.”

Then you have to change the settings under Split from “Number of Pages” to “Top Level Bookmarks.” If you want, under Output Options, there is a setting “Use bookmark names for file names.” You can ONLY choose that if you’ve already chosen “Top Level Bookmarks” for your splitting option, though. Otherwise it’s greyed out and you can’t select it.

Typically, when I’m splitting a PDF, I’ll go through and bookmark the beginning of each chapter, then use the file splitting to make my chapters. It’s quicker than exporting or printing each chapter manually.

-Andi :)

--------------------------
Andrea Dietrich
Cornell University
Student Disability Services
Cornell Health, Level 5
110 Ho Plaza
Ithaca, NY 14853
http://sds.cornell.edu<http://sds.cornell.edu/>

Tel. 607.254.4545
Fax. 607.255.1562

Office Hours:
Monday-Thursday 8:15AM-4:45PM
Friday 8:15AM-4:00PM

From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> On Behalf Of Robert Spangler
Sent: Tuesday, September 4, 2018 11:24 AM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Athen] Editing PDFs with a Screen Reader

Thank you!  Where can I find this setting?  Worth looking into.


On Tue, Sep 4, 2018 at 11:13 AM Andrea L. Dietrich <adietrich at cornell.edu<mailto:adietrich at cornell.edu>> wrote:
For chapter splitting, there’s actually a setting in Acrobat where you can tell the program to split on “top-level bookmarks,” and it just exports all the chapters separately. IDK how well that would work with a screen reader but it’s less time-consuming than printing each PDF to a file individually, in my experience.

Just FYI – sorry I can’t speak to the rest of your questions, since I’m sighted.

Good luck!

-Andi :)

--------------------------
Andrea Dietrich
Cornell University
Student Disability Services
Cornell Health, Level 5
110 Ho Plaza
Ithaca, NY 14853
http://sds.cornell.edu<http://sds.cornell.edu/>

Tel. 607.254.4545
Fax. 607.255.1562

Office Hours:
Monday-Thursday 8:15AM-4:45PM
Friday 8:15AM-4:00PM

From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu<mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu>> On Behalf Of Robert Spangler
Sent: Tuesday, September 4, 2018 10:54 AM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu<mailto:athen-list at u.washington.edu>>
Subject: Re: [Athen] Editing PDFs with a Screen Reader

Thanks so much for this detailed explanation.  I have HTML experience, so this makes a lot of sense.  Often times I do not have a student worker available to help me (summer breaks and such) so I have to break books into chapters upon receipt from the publisher.  I find it very useful if there are bookmarks, because I can extract those by going to this treeview in Adobe, invoking the context menu on each one and choosing print section.  I then print it to the Microsoft Print to PDF.

Many books do not offer this luxury, however, and it's much harder to find the page numbers to know what ranges to extract for each chapter.  Is this another task that is simply going to be tougher for those of us who use screen readers?  The way Adobe lags with screen readers, jumps around at times in the buffer, just makes me want to bang my head against the wall every time I have to deal with it.  I use a program called QRead for reading PDFs which simplifies the experience by presenting the document like a text file.

Robert


On Tue, Sep 4, 2018 at 10:34 AM Karlen Communications <info at karlencommunications.com<mailto:info at karlencommunications.com>> wrote:
No, Bookmarks are typically a list of the Headings in a document. If you are using Word, you can turn on the Navigation Pane (Alt + W, K in Word 2013/2016) and get a list of Headings in the document. This is similar to what you get when you convert a Word document or other formats to tagged PDF and have the “create Bookmarks from Headings” setting turned on. It is also similar to getting a list of Headings with your adaptive technology.

Apologies, I forget the keyboard command in versions of Word prior to 2013. Then it was under View, Document Map.

Tags are similar to the HTML Tags where every paragraph has a <P> Tag, a Heading 1 has an <H1> Tag with other Headings having corresponding numbers. Lists have a parent <L> Tag with an <Lbl> Tag for a bullet or number and an <LBody> Tag for the content of the bullet or number. Tables have a parent <Table> Tag and every row has a <TR> Tag with the cells having either <TH> Tags for table Header cells or <TD> Tags for table Data cells.

When adaptive technology gets a list of Headings, it should be drawing on the information in the Tags to get that list. The Bookmarks are another way to navigate the content if the document doesn’t have a Table of Contents or if you don’t want to return to a Table of Contents to move to another topic…you can open the Bookmarks Panel in the Adobe Reader or Acrobat Navigation Pane and see the “list of Headings.” Of course you can make anything a Bookmark in a PDF document, but generally we use Headings to provide consistent navigational tools.

Cheers, Karen

From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu<mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu>> On Behalf Of Robert Spangler
Sent: Tuesday, September 4, 2018 10:10 AM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu<mailto:athen-list at u.washington.edu>>
Subject: Re: [Athen] Editing PDFs with a Screen Reader

Yeah, that stinks.  Are the tags in the PDF the same thing is what Adobe calls Bookmarks?


On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 9:46 AM Karlen Communications <info at karlencommunications.com<mailto:info at karlencommunications.com>> wrote:
Screen readers and Text-to-Speech tools are always in ”virtual view” of HTML and PDF documents. This means that the adaptive technology is reading from the buffer not the text layer of the document, In PDF, this is the Tags Tree. It is the reason we can’t add notes or other comments to PDF documents – where we think we are in the document is not where we are, it is where we are in the buffer. It is also why we can’t follow notes or comments in PDF documents. For us, there is no connection between the note or comment and the “text on the page.”

While we can go down the Tags Tree, open the tags and review some of the content/that is showing, we can’t tell if content has been missed or tagged correctly based on what is on the visual representation of the page we are working from.

You do need eyesight to fully remediate PDF documents.

Cheers, Karen

From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu<mailto: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<mailto: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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--
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
_______________________________________________
athen-list mailing list
athen-list at mailman12.u.washington.edu<mailto:athen-list at mailman12.u.washington.edu>
http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/athen-list


--
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
_______________________________________________
athen-list mailing list
athen-list at mailman12.u.washington.edu<mailto:athen-list at mailman12.u.washington.edu>
http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/athen-list


--
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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