Re: Fw: Acrobat 4.0 And PDF Accessibility

I don't know. I used to feed tiff files to the OCR stuff I used (I forget the
name, but it was shareware and read about a dozen languages. It was on a
windows machine. I used a commercial piece of software on the mac, with about
the same results but not as many languages). For PDF I used to print and scan
(I didn't use a lot of PDF, so it wasn't a big issue. Most of the systems I
was working on didn't have acrobat, so I just wrote to the authors and asked
for HTML. It was horrible HTML I usually got back, but it could be fixed up.)

Charles McCN

On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Bruce Bailey wrote:

  I agree with you on this point, and I can only hope that they will see the
  light and standardize on HTML.  In the meantime I am currently fighting
  with a university system which might buy into this "accessible PDF"
  approach.  Do the current Acrobat tools facilitate this approach?  Even if
  this way is more time/labor intensive, if the burden can be put on the
  bureaucracy, it is less work for the student!
  
  How does one feed PDF files to an OCR program (without printing them)?
  
  ------
  > I can't speak from experience with the new acrobat, but generally by the
  > time you have to do transcription from an image you are usually better
  > off feeding the image to Optical Character Recognition software and then
  > making HTML out of the result.
  > 
  > Charles McCN
  > 
  > On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Bruce Bailey wrote:
  > 
  >   Can anyone speak from experience about the difficulty of converting a
  >   poorly-structure PDF document to one that is mostly accessible?
  >   
  >   For example, if a PDF file is basically a series of text images (from,
  say,
  >   a magazine article), and a (sighted) laborer is available to do the
  >   after-the-fact transcription, how hard is it to create a new
  "accessible"
  >   PDF file?  What tools are needed?  Does the new version of Acrobat
  change
  >   any of this?
  >   
  >   Thanks.
  

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Tuesday, 1 June 1999 14:13:56 UTC