[gui-talk] Difficulties with court transcripts in PDF format and JAWS

[Susan Kelly]

Thanks - I have JAWS professional (just recently installed) - is that the same as JAWS 16?  Embarrassingly enough, I have been too busy with work to spend much time exploring the  upgrades, although my assistant has tried many of the features and found them to be blocked by our network environment...  I will try this to see if it can make it past the network issues.  Thanks again! 

-----Original Message-----
From: Wayne Merritt [mailto:wcmerritt at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2015 3:26 PM
To: Susan Kelly; Discussion of the Graphical User Interface, GUI Talk Mailing List
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] Difficulties with court transcripts in PDF format and JAWS

If you have JAWS 16, you might try the Convenient OCR feature. Start by pressing Insert with Space, then O for OCR, then either S to recognize the screen or W to recognize the window. For help after you press O for OCR, use the questionmark. This feature is supposed to have gotten some improvements in JAWS 16. If you have Kurzweil 1000 or OpenBook, you might try to open/import the files in them. I have had really good results with Kurzweil 1000 when opening PDF files.

Best,
Wayne


On 1/20/15, Susan Kelly via gui-talk <gui-talk at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> Our court of appeals loads the transcripts for cases to its website, 
> which is becoming increasingly inaccessible, thanks to the use of 
> semi-described images on at least half of its links instead of properly labeled link-boxes.
>  I can navigate around that, albeit slowly, by continuing to click 
> through each link (they don't list well) until I hear what seems to be 
> the proper link for whatever it is I need to do.  The real problem 
> comes in once I have accessed my case file and try to listen to the 
> transcripts themselves.  Some are PDF, while others are simply .tif or 
> .jpg scans.  On top of that, even the PDF files have not been properly 
> OCRd, or so it seems, as they will not read through continuously despite my settings in Adobe and JAWS.
>
> My assistant has tried to circumvent this issue by downloading the 
> file to our office network.  The problem persists, though, with the 
> narration stopping at then of each page; using a "page down" or "ctrl page down"
> command is ineffective, as reading starts back up mid-page; I thus 
> have to advance it one line forward (which does not read) and then 
> back up one and start the "read all" command again to read each page.  
> This is very time-consuming and annoying, and I have to assume that it 
> is, at least in part, the result of the manner in which the court 
> reporter has transcribed the documents.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions how to tackle this problem?  Also, 
> does anyone know how I would word a polite letter to the reporters / 
> courts to suggest that these documents be better prepared?  Because I 
> work in the juvenile court, our time limits are extremely short and 
> this is a time waste that I really would like to avoid.
>
> Thanks!
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