FL Prod1
Hello, this is Julie Balassa from
the Office for Students
with Disabilities.
Today I’m going to show you
what is involved in
alternate format production
of foreign language textbooks.
This is part one.
I’m going to show you how to
optical character recognize
these pages and a little bit of
what’s involved in marking them up
correctly.
Part two will focus more on
Daisy production.
So what you see before you are two pages
of chapter one of a textbook called
Ande, a Spanish textbook that was
requested in alt format by some students
who are blind.
The biggest challenge of
alt format production of
foreign language textbooks is that
screen readers cannot auto detect
language in documents that have
more than one language unless
those languages are marked up
and they are not marked
from the publishers.
This is a publisher provided pdf file.
So you see that there’s some Spanish.
There’s some English.
There’s some circular text.
There’s a vocabulary section.
This is page two of just these two pages
that I extracted.
This is a little more
evenly distributed;
quite a bit of Spanish,
quite a bit of English.
And then of course this is page 32
and the page 32 we produce
has to be identical because when
the instructor says go to page 32,
the student who uses alt format
should be able to go to the
same page 32 as everybody else.
The reason why we have to mark
the languages is because a student
would have to manually select
the language of the part
that they’re reading.
So if they were reading
an English portion,
they’d have to select an English voice;
a Spanish portion, a Spanish voice.
That’s very cumbersome,
difficult to do, and it doesn’t
meet the requirements of
the Office of Civil Rights because
it requires students to have skills
that are outside of the skills that
they need to have just in order
to take the class.
So the first step is
that we’re going to do
he other OCR,
optical character recognize
these pages.
We’re going to use a program
called Abbey.
This is the Julia Child version
because I already pulled
the pages into Abbey.
When Abbey imports pages
for example from a pdf file,
it’s going to want to scan them.
When it’s scanning, it’s looking
for text to recognize.
You’ll see that the text here
is circular.
It’s not linear so Abbey
is going to recognize the text
but it won’t know exactly
what order to put it in,
and it’s also going to make some
misrecognition errors which
we’re going to have to correct.
So we’ll have to correct
the reading order
and we’ll have to correct
the misrecognitions.
We’re not going to describe
the picture here and we’re not going to
set the languages here.
We’ll do that in Microsoft Word.
So once we’re all done with
setting the reading order
and correcting the misrecognitions,
we’re going to save it as
a Word document
which is going to look
something like this.
Here is page 32 which is
the same page 32 as this.
In this Word document we broke
the pages in the right place,
and we numbered them,
and we also set some headings
and styles.
For example, this is a heading two.
Headings and styles enable
screen readers to navigate which is
necessary because students who use
alt format should also be able to go
to particular sections of the book.
So a student should not have to
browse through this entire document
to find the section called
Comunicacion.
Calling this a heading two enables
the screen reader to jump
to that section.
But the most time consuming portion
is to set the languages so
alt format production is an art.
It’s not a science and it requires
a great deal of judgment.
For example, how to describe
this image here but also whether to
set the primary language as English
or Spanish.
By primary I mean what is
the most predominant language
in this document.
Well, this is a Spanish one so
maybe it’s English.
So if I select the entire document
and then I set the proofing languages
English U.S., then I have to go back
and I have to select
all the Spanish portions as Spanish.
But if I do this I’ve made a mistake
because now I’ve selected Spanish
and English and I don’t want to change
the English language to Spanish.
I don’t want to set the English parts
with a Spanish proofing voice
so I select all of this and then
I go back and I select that as Spanish.
Once I’ve done this in this
entire document, then I can export this
to an html file and then Jaws
will auto detect the language as
an automatically read the Spanish
in a Spanish voice
and the English in an English voice.
If the student does not use Jaws,
then I have to convert to Daisy
and that’s a slightly different
process.
I have to mark the languages
in the Daisy production program
because it doesn’t recognize
when I’ve marked it in Microsoft Word
and that’s a little more time consuming
and it’s the topic of the second video.