adobe acrobat and visual impairments

[Rachel Singer Gordon]

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


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Rachel Singer Gordon / rsinger at linc.lib.il.us
Head, Computer Services / Franklin Park Library
http://www.franklinparklibrary.org
http://www.lisjobs.com
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