PDF & HP Digital Sender

Hello Loretta,

Coinciding with the WAI list renewed discussion on the PDF topic, I'm 
running into a new situation at work that you may or may not know about.

I work for UCLA's Disabilities and Computing Program, and one of the 
services we provide is document conversion for print-impaired students.

We have a blind student who is about to start as a graduate teaching 
assistant. His department sent me the first of a large number of documents 
in PDF prepared with the HP Digital Sender.

I hadn't heard of the Digital Sender before now. From what I can tell it 
combines scanning & email software, so you can scan zillions of docs & send 
'em out to the world ... in PDF or TIFF form (with no underlying text in 
the PDF). (Not sure of the TIFF quality for OCR purposes.) So it becomes 
very easy for an organization to get a system like this & start cranking 
out the inaccessibility.

For details on the Digital Sender products:
>>    http://www.digitalsender.hp.com

Are you familiar with systems like this? Is there anything that can be done 
to docs in these systems to add the underlying text? (I imagine one would 
have to do OCR, proof it, and add it to the file in the Acrobat editor. If 
that is so, then in our case we will probably go ahead & do the OCR 
ourselves & give that to the student.) I'm not expecting you to solve our 
immediate problem, but the HP Digital Sender seems to be a prime source of 
inaccessible PDFs. If there is already a solution, great! If not, maybe you 
can work out something with the powers at HP.

Thanks for being there and for all your work,

Patrick

Received on Friday, 25 October 2002 14:00:20 UTC