Issues with PDF files

There are often various accessibility issues with PDF documents that prevent some users from being able to read, copy, search, or annotate the content.

One problem is that if you create a PDF document by scanning the pages of a book or article, the text in the document cannot be highlighted, copied, searched, or annotated. This is because the scanned text is only converted into an image in the PDF, not actual text.

This doesn't just apply to older scanned documents. Some types of software convert text into images when generating PDF files, such as word clouds generated by Mentimeter.

Improve your PDF documents with OCR

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a process that converts images into text. It is a technology widely used for various purposes. OCR is one of the tools you can use to significantly improve the accessibility of a document.

Ally offers OCR as an alternative format. Please note that the quality of the OCR version depends on the quality of the original document, so OCR may not work optimally with all types of documents, and OCR alone does not solve all accessibility issues.

Example:

On the right is a scanned PDF document displaying two pages from a book. Ally has converted the PDF document using OCR. As you can see in the video, the document has significantly improved after OCR.

Advantages

By using OCR as an alternative format with Ally, you achieve the following advantages:

Significantly improved document accessibility for blind and visually impaired users.
Enhanced readability of the document for all users.
Enables users to search for words and phrases in the document, copy and paste portions of the text, as well as highlight or annotate within the document.

How to generate using Ally

Find and click on the Ally icon, for example, at the top of a webpage or in the document view in Canvas.

1. Pages, Quizzes, Assignments, Discussions, and Announcements

The Ally icon for alternative formats is located at the end of the page title

2. Documents

The Ally icon for alternative formats is located at the top of the document view, next to the Download and Info buttons.

Before OCR:

After OCR (video)

Summary of the video: The text of the document was converted into digital text, and the user in the video highlights parts of the text with a mouse, which is visible as the highlighted text gets a blue background. The user then searches for the word 'distribusjon' in the document and can navigate to where the word appears, but this is not very clear due to low video quality. The video contains no speech or sound.