[WEB4LIB] adobe acrobat and visual impairments

[Jose Manuel Barrueco]

	Hi Rachel,

	At:

	http://weblib.cern.ch/cgi-bin/showrec?base=CERCER&field1=rn&freetext1=CERN-OPEN-2001-065

	you will find an interesting paper by Robinson, N. describing and
comparing different tools to convert PDF or PostScript files to ASCII.

	Cheers,


On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, 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
> ---
> 
> 

-- 
Jose Manuel Barrueco				Jose.Barrueco at uv.es