[WEB4LIB] adobe acrobat and visual impairments

[Chris Murphy]

I tested an open source tool called PDF2TXT, developed by Jamal Mazrui, described as

"The PDF2TXT system for converting files from Adobe Acrobat portable document format to plain text format via a DOS command line under Windows 9X".

PDF2TXT can be downloaded from http://www.empowermentzone.com .

I used PDF2TXT under Win98SE and WinXP and had similar results. Some conversions were a bit troublesome, and non-alphabetic characters were included in the text, but your results may depend on the contents or quality of the source PDF file.

In any event, the resulting text can be imported into a word processor or other software and manipulated to increase accessibility.

Hope this helps.

Chris Murphy

-- 
Christopher Murphy
Information Systems Manager
The Community Library, Ketchum, Idaho
ism at thecommunitylibrary.org
http://www.thecommunitylibrary.org


Rachel Singer Gordon wrote:
> 
> Hi all -
> 
> I have a question from a patron who is heavily visually impaired and
> running into difficulties with Adobe Acrobat documents. His vision is
> such that the "zoom" feature in Acrobat Reader is useless to him. He
> is trying to read and quote from lengthy legal court documents, and
> wants to convert said documents into ASCII text so that he is more
> readily able to work with them.
> 
> He has used Adobe's accessibility feature at
> http://access.adobe.com/simple_form.html to try converting documents,
> both with their online HTML and their e-mail conversion services.
> This does convert .pdf documents, however, he ends up with a number
> of 'garbage' characters ($$, lines through letters, etc.). This is
> very difficult for him to read and make sense of, especially when
> he's going through legal documents and isn't sure what is a garbage
> character and what might be a legitimate character in the name of a
> case.
> 
> (One of the documents he is trying to convert is
> http://www.supremecourtus.gov/ctrules/ctrules.html -- the second .pdf
> on "Rules of the Court" -- note that you need to strip off the
> akamaitech part of the URL to get it to convert in the adobe form.)
> 
> He has contacted Adobe, who suggested that he purchase Acrobat
> Distiller from them, which he cannot afford. He has also run across
> an even more expensive conversion product from Kurzweil, but is
> looking for a free or very low-cost solution.
> 
> Suggestions?
> 
> Thanks!
> - Rachel
> 
> ---
> Rachel Singer Gordon / rsinger at linc.lib.il.us
> Head, Computer Services / Franklin Park Library
> http://www.franklinparklibrary.org
> http://www.lisjobs.com
> ---