Stay Focused!

This short article reminds us all to keep our eyes on the ball.

This term my e-text production service started converting a lot of PDF files into various forms of alternative-text. Things were going well and then we hit a few files that “choked” our ocr software OmniPage Pro. Opening the PDF in it’s native environment, Adobe Acrobat Pro, and stripping out some “document information” initially solved the problem. (Don’t ask me why…)

Finally a file came for which this solution did not work. It became a real technical challenge to “fix” this PDF. My staff and I searched the internet for similar problems and (hopefully) a solution. We tore apart the file in Acrobat Pro searching for its “fatal flaw.” I wouldn’t say we were obsessed, but we were pretty dedicated to solving this problem.

Then it hit me.

Actually a student worker provided the clarity with these words, “Why don’t we print it and scan it?” In that moment I realized that we (I) had lost site of getting usable text to the student and had jumped down some technological rabbit hole. Printing and scanning solved the problem in just a few minutes. Granted, you don’t want to do this with all your PDF files, but if you get one that defies cooperating with your other technology, just print it. I know that there are PDFs that will not print by design, but that is a topic for some future article.

The moral of this story is to stay focused on your original goal. In this case, getting clean usable text to a student with a print related disability. Technology has a seductive way of taking your attention from your task and redirecting it onto the process itself. You’ve been warned!