E-mail List Archives
Thread: scanning documents to PDF and accessibility
Number of posts in this thread: 7 (In chronological order)
From: Angela French
Date: Fri, Aug 19 2016 11:23AM
Subject: scanning documents to PDF and accessibility
No previous message | Next message →
Hello,
Is it possible for documents to be scanned to PDF and be accessible? We are getting PDF documents to post on our website that have been scanned. They are failing the accessibility scan in Acrobat which sees them as images. How are documents like this remediated?
Do techniques like this create accessible documents: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/scan-documents-pdf.html
Angela French
Internet/Intranet Specialist
Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges
360-704-4316
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = <mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
www.sbctc.edu<;http://www.sbctc.edu/>;
From: Marc Solomon
Date: Fri, Aug 19 2016 11:29AM
Subject: Re: scanning documents to PDF and accessibility
← Previous message | Next message →
Hi Angela,
This resource should help you better understand the general process that should be followed to remediate a scanned image PDF: http://www.section508.va.gov/support/tutorials/pdf/1scandocs_1.asp.
Best,
Marc
From: Jamous, JP
Date: Fri, Aug 19 2016 11:31AM
Subject: Re: scanning documents to PDF and accessibility
← Previous message | Next message →
That's always been an issue. That is why JAWS came out with the OCR engine for PDF files.
Do yourself a favor. Open a Microsoft Word and start typing those pages. Lastly, save it as a PDF file.
That's the only way to making it accessible by screen readers.
Remember, PDF is made to house images, sounds and videos. To save yourself most of the work, scan the pages into an OCR software like Kurzweil and edit the pages to be presentable and free of unrecognizable characters. You can save the document as RTF and open it with Word for further proof reading and styling before conversion to PDF.
**************************************************
Jean-Pierre Jamous
Digital Accessibility Specialist & Developer
UI Accessibility Team
The only limitations in life are those we set for ourselves
**************************************************
From: Karlen Communications
Date: Fri, Aug 19 2016 11:32AM
Subject: Re: scanning documents to PDF and accessibility
← Previous message | Next message →
I don't find the on-board OCR in Acrobat to be useful. I first take a scanned document into ABBYY PDF Transformer and make the text searchable. I then take the document back into Acrobat and then perform the OCR. This gives me fewer errors. I can then work with the document, first adding links or form controls and then Tag the document. Once the document is tagged, I can perform any remediations and add any Alt Text.
Cheers, Karen
From: Dominic Capuano (gmail)
Date: Fri, Aug 19 2016 12:27PM
Subject: Re: scanning documents to PDF and accessibility
← Previous message | Next message →
Angela;
I think that you might have to go in through Acrobat and manually add tags.
I have had to do this with a document and it is not fun. I would be very
interested to see if someone else has a better idea.
Dominic Capuano
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
(h)(401) 726-2551
From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Fri, Aug 19 2016 7:03PM
Subject: Re: scanning documents to PDF and accessibility
← Previous message | Next message →
> I don't find the on-board OCR in Acrobat to be useful. I first take a scanned document into ABBYY PDF Transformer and make the text searchable
Plus 1 to using the OCR cleanup in Abby. I've had good experience with products that use it
Jonathan
Sent from my iPhone
> On Aug 19, 2016, at 11:32 AM, Karlen Communications < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
>
> I don't find the on-board OCR in Acrobat to be useful. I first take a scanned document into ABBYY PDF Transformer and make the text searchable
From: whitneyq
Date: Sun, Aug 21 2016 1:28PM
Subject: Re: scanning documents to PDF and accessibility
← Previous message | No next message
Depending on what the documents look like, you might be better off OCRing them, correcting the markup (and typos) in a word processor, and then making th he accessible PDF.
You get a better PDF and recover the source file.
-------- Original message --------From: "Dominic Capuano (gmail)" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > Date: 8/19/16 2:27 PM (GMT-05:00) To: 'Angela French' < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >, 'WebAim Forum' < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > Subject: Re: [WebAIM] scanning documents to PDF and accessibility
Angela;
I think that you might have to go in through Acrobat and manually add tags.
I have had to do this with a document and it is not fun. I would be very
interested to see if someone else has a better idea.
Dominic Capuano
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
(h)(401) 726-2551