[Athen] Editing PDFs with a Screen Reader

[S A. Marositz]

Oddly, I found one of these when I was cleaning out our old alt-media production room. I guess I am a bit too young because I had no idea what it was or why our college had one. I only found out a year or so ago. I would have kept it had I known.

Stephen Alexander Marositz JD, CPACC
Assistive Technology Specialist, Pasadena City College
Phone: (626) 585-7242

From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> On Behalf Of Deborah Armstrong
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2018 9:46 AM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Athen] Editing PDFs with a Screen Reader

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 the 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<mailto: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<mailto: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 <armstrongdeborah at fhda.edu<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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<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<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2furldefense.proofpoint.com%2fv2%2furl%3fu%3dhttp-3A__go.udayton.edu_learning%26d%3dDwMFaQ%26c%3dWORo6LNFtQOb4SPVta8Jsg%26r%3dK_2Yg4I05GGnHlSOevlp3QeE5-JEqtmoUnmP0YVj9ZM%26m%3dNS6Bk8hB7g4EqHf06xQXAt98sM4ynBrgA6aH6fAFYcY%26s%3dSE2K9eRPMfVmyX0gQLSHzF-X3TtwOEZzPIu29qov2Ro%26e%3d&c=E,1,_Dkmme-oHNDgTRbfCDr38b-VvWYix4ID3Yf_hg-plbW7kt1BaWELk5HYQE1C27VM8n2v76oBjH4obkzHHaJ0lO19xHi2PH0b_pR-jLjcCqxOoHzz_YKfOALP2IE,&typo=1>
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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<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2furldefense.proofpoint.com%2fv2%2furl%3fu%3dhttp-3A__go.udayton.edu_learning%26d%3dDwMFaQ%26c%3dWORo6LNFtQOb4SPVta8Jsg%26r%3dK_2Yg4I05GGnHlSOevlp3QeE5-JEqtmoUnmP0YVj9ZM%26m%3dzSd-G2OVJD5hDKTrm7NWbQdUtoLoAEBZUmUJTFYyo4Q%26s%3dEEcWRb99V7MLaDegiEwC4PRXv6BGGsjlXLh-q-wSniU%26e%3d&c=E,1,YSusj82wowVJSZNAbgxiR0ajSi863Ks7lzKjeCo3FeMjQ6whFAbALCpHB9TeD2tTj_B0xw8kTnklWV8Wc_rErUFMPnxi02sS5hzVactzyE_t9QTGCc8Yw8MEWQ,,&typo=1>
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