Hi Paul, I've already checked. While there are scanned copies of the sourcebooks out there on The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites they aren't at all screen reader accessible. What I mean by that is a lot of people just scan the sourcebooks, save the individual pages as jpg images, and then create a pdf document of all the pictures. So what we end up with when downloading these sourcebooks in pdf format is three to four hundred pictures of the pages but nothing the screen readers can read. It is just all one big graphic as far as Jaws, Window-Eyes, NVDA, etc is concerned.
Of course, I do understand the reasoning behind why the people are scanning the pages as images and saving them as a pdf document rather than converting them to text using an OCR program like Omnipage. The books are full of pictures of the various aliens, ships, weapons, droids, etc. If someone were to scan the book using Omnipage it would take a picture of the page, remove any images from the page, and convert the printed words to ascii text. Therefore all the images and artwork in the books would be gone. Most sighted people wouldn't want that so they just take a picture of the page as it doesn't prevent them from reading it, but is totally inaccessible to us. So in the end I'm right back where I started. I have to scan the books in Openbook, spell check the documents, and save them in a format like text. Then, if I want the formatting etc back use html to reformat everything so it is both screen reader readable and more or less has the same formatting as the print copy. Easier said than done though. I've scanned several pages of the New Jedi Order Sourcebook today and Openbook consistently made stupid mistakes. For example, instead of Yuuzhan Vong it would put something in like Yang which isn't even close to the correct spelling or name of that alien race. I am suspecting Openbook is trying to convert it into English, uses some type of error checking, and since Yuuzhan Vong isn't in its vocabulary it tries to guess using some other word like Yang which makes sense to it. One reason I think that is because in the New Jedi Order series there is a female scientist named Danni Quee. Well when scanning the sourcebook I've seen Openbook scan her name as Dan Queen twice. Again that's totally wrong, not even close,and of course Freedom Scientific's stupid spell checker doesn't get the mistake either. I've only found those kinds of errors by editing the pages manually and using my own knolege of the Star Wars universe to fix and correct mistakes that Openbook made. Cheers! On 6/15/12, Paul Lemm <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't really know much about these source books you are talking about, > but > I would imagine there must be tons out there and surely someone has already > scanned these onto a computer. I know a lot of people will disagree with > torrent (peer to peer) sharing sites but is it worth taking a look through > Google to see if these are already out there. I disagree with outright > piracy but if you already own the original anyway then your just using > the > site to get a back up version so doing nothing wrong (at least that's how I > thought it works and the way these sites get round breaking any laws and > aren't shut down straight away) like dark I live in the UK and have had > difficulties getting certain audio books and although the RNIB does have a > big selection there are still a lot of books they either don't have or > don't have the complete series off. I have some hard back books from when I > could see and couldn't get the audio version in the auk so since I owned > the > original and can't get an audio copy I've downloaded it but like I said > since I own the original in my opinion don't think I'm doing anything wrong > (others might disagree) but I've brought the product and just want to read > and enjoy it again. And don't think I shouldn't be able to just because its > not accessable in this country. > --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
