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Re: automatic document testing

for

From: Ryan E. Benson
Date: Oct 25, 2011 8:45PM

Lucy,
The problem with making sure documents of this type is that there
isn't a simple fix, this is coming from a person who was a student and
worked in a large AT lab. The scanned articles are 2nd,3rd maybe 4th
generation copies. The built in OCR into Acrobat usually destroyed the
text. The disabled student's services at the university would require
that if a student needed an accessible version, bring their reading
into the office and the disabled student's services office hires
students who takes a hard or soft-copy version and run it through
ABBYY FineReader, then editing as need be. We started to work with the
library, who manages the e-reserves, I moved onto another job, so I
cannot say what the current status is. The university that I worked at
is equal size to Berkeley. We are too large to make each e-reserve
accessible, even though people are trying. We try to advocate the use
of HTML files whenever possible, for example, professors tend to grab
an article from Lexus Nexus and turn that into a PDF. While the HTML
version doesn't have headings, it is usually easier to use over a PDF.

--
Ryan E. Benson



On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Lucy Greco < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Hi:
>  This is meant to be steps used while moving forward. I have been asked to give a three or four step process to make sure readings for students are accessible basically it's a set of instructions I am to give to faculty to assure that the documents they put online e are accessible. These documents might be scanned articles  library readings exerts from books and so on. I have been told that it cannot be more than three or four steps so that it would not be intimidating and that talking about structure and tagging  is getting to technical. I am at a loss really because what I think I am being asked to say is that providing the text is all that is needed. And I really don't want to say that. One of the other things I was asked was if there was a way to flag a potential problem document on the way to it being uploaded. I am really frustrated on this process I know access is not extraordinarily hard but three or four steps is not enough ether.  At least I am not looking at making
>  forms in this project.  I have to have the documents be usable by a highly intelligent group. but I have also been told that the faculty don't want steps that will take more than a few minutes to do.
>
>
> Lucy Greco
> Assistive Technology Specialist
> Disabled Student's Program UC Berkeley
> (510) 643-7591
> http://attlc.berkeley.edu
> http://webaccess.berkeley.edu
>
>
>