[Athen] Editing PDFs with a Screen Reader

[David Andrews]

I think the Optacon came out in the early to mid 
70's. I had training in 1977. Everything you say 
is accurate. Even with the training, I probably 
only did about 15 words per minute. I used it on 
my first job, as a news writer at an all-news 
radio station, to check my typing if I thought I 
made a fatal mistake. As you say, it was 
difficult to learn and use, a few people mastered 
it, and love it, there are still a few users 
around.  Most people, however, didn't become fast 
enough to make it truly useful. It was an early 
AT device though, and helped create the field for 
adaptive devices. I sold mine to buy my first talking computer, an Apple 2E.

Dave

At 11:45 AM 9/7/2018, you wrote:

>Content-Language: en-US

>Content-Type: multipart/alternative;

> 

>boundary="_000_61C6DD490FBB3D43A1AA33BF158ED7AF0293799E49MB1FHDALEARN_"

>

>Optacon was a device invented in the late 

>seventies by a Stanford professor with a 

>daughter who was blind. He formed the company, 

>TeleSensory, to market it – they were perhaps 

>thee first access technology company. They also 

>created the first Braille notetaker, the VersaBraille.

>

>The Optacon has a camera on a cable you slide 

>across a printed page. The black-and-white image 

>from the camera is converted to a tactile image 

>on an array of vibrating pins. The early 

>Optacons had 144 pins; the later ones had 100. A 

>typical 12-point character will fill the array, 

>showing a tactile image of that character. You 

>can use the Optacon to examine any printed 

>material, even handwriting, but your brain has 

>to do all the interpreting, and you are seeing 

>less than a half-inch of the material at any 

>time. “Tracking” or moving the camera 

>straight across a page and staying on a line of 

>print is the hardest task to master.

>

>Because it is so difficult to use, nobody ever created a competing device.

>

>Training to learn the Optacon was long and 

>arduous.  Blind people who faithfully practiced 

>daily for a year could read print at about 80 words per minute.

>

>I taught myself so my speed is more around nine 

>words per minute, because I could not afford the 

>training. I can read page numbers and check page 

>orientation with it, and I can also see if there 

>are pictures on a page. I use it mostly to skim 

>through a book to examine the layout, and 

>sometimes to check things I’ve printed myself. 

>I don’t really do any reading with it. There 

>is also a device to read a CRT screen with the Optacon but I gave mine away.

>

>Another thing that made the Optacon difficult 

>was proportional spacing and all the kerning and 

>ligatures in fonts. This is less of an issue for 

>me because in training myself, I printed out 

>examples of every font I could find. The Optacon 

>training manual is all in easy Courier. It tends 

>to give one a false sense of success!

>

>

>

>From: athen-list 

><athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> On Behalf Of Robert Spangler

>Sent: Friday, September 07, 2018 7:48 AM

>To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>

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

>

>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 

><<mailto:armstrongdeborah at fhda.edu>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 

><<mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu>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' 

><<mailto:athen-list at u.washington.edu>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 docuument 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 

><<mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu>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 

><<mailto:athen-list at u.washington.edu>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

><mailto:rspangler1 at udayton.edu>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: 

><https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__go.udayton.edu_learning&d=DwMFaQ&c=WORo6LNFtQOb4SPVta8Jsg&r=K_2Yg4I05GGnHlSOevlp3QeE5-JEqtmoUnmP0YVj9ZM&m=NS6Bk8hB7g4EqHf06xQXAt98sM4ynBrgA6aH6fAFYcY&s=SE2K9eRPMfVmyX0gQLSHzF-X3TtwOEZzPIu29qov2Ro&e=>http://go.udayton.edu/learning

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>

>--

>Robert Spangler

>Disability Services Technical Support Specialist

><mailto:rspangler1 at udayton.edu>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: 

><https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__go.udayton.edu_learning&d=DwMFaQ&c=WORo6LNFtQOb4SPVta8Jsg&r=K_2Yg4I05GGnHlSOevlp3QeE5-JEqtmoUnmP0YVj9ZM&m=zSd-G2OVJD5hDKTrm7NWbQdUtoLoAEBZUmUJTFYyo4Q&s=EEcWRb99V7MLaDegiEwC4PRXv6BGGsjlXLh-q-wSniU&e=>http://go.udayton.edu/learning

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