[Athen] Editing PDFs with a Screen Reader

[Robert Spangler]

What is an Optacon?  I use various scanning apps on my phone for the
purpose of reading print documents.


On Thu, Sep 6, 2018 at 1:39 PM Deborah Armstrong <armstrongdeborah at fhda.edu>
wrote:


> This is a really great explanation of why PDF remediation with a screen

> reader is not an accessible process. Clearly written!

>

>

>

> I would add that OmniPage is reasonably accessible, and it for me does

> better OCR than Adobe Pro produces with automatic settings.

>

>

>

> When I get a publisher PDF, even if it seems to read out loud OK, I run it

> through OmniPage and make a few changes in its mostly accessible editor. If

> the student wants the book right away I tell them they can have the

> unaltered PDF and to email me what remediations they truly need. This saves

> me a lot of work, because only some students need some remediations.

>

>

>

> Another solution if your student wants to see and hear the book is to give

> them the unaltered PDF and a word document with the entire text that you’ve

> cleaned up some with an accessible program like K1000. Changing the reading

> order in K1000 is of course perfectly accessible.

>

>

>

> Another feature I love in K1000 is its ranked spelling which lets me clean

> up the worst errors quickly. Instead of presenting spelling errors in

> chronological order, it presents them in frequency of occurrence order. So

> I can zap 97% of the errors in five minutes.

>

> Both K1000 and OmniPage have accessible ways of moving pages around or

> knowing what page you are on.

>

>

>

> It’s too bad nobody has made a modern Optacon. When I dropped an unbound

> book on the floor and got some pages out of order, and I was the only one

> in the office, I was glad I could still sort of use mine!

>

>

>

> --Debee

>

>

>

>

>

> *From:* athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> *On

> Behalf Of *Karlen Communications

> *Sent:* Friday, August 31, 2018 6:35 AM

> *To:* 'Access Technology Higher Education Network' <

> athen-list at u.washington.edu>

> *Subject:* Re: [Athen] Editing PDFs with a Screen Reader

>

>

>

> 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> *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

> 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
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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