Topic by zkline 2021-04-17 20:27:22

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Hi ALl,

A sighted friend is interested in offering her services to provide transcription for inaccessible documents. This is probably going to be a niche kind of thing, but she enjoys helping people and has done this for a few specialized things for me previously.

That being said, I was wondering if anyone here had ideas for the logistics of this? She isn't thinking of charging for the service at this date, it's just a volunteer thing, and obviously turn-around time would depend on the nature of the document. This would be for things like transcribing inaccessible PDF into Word format, that kind of thing. OCR is certainly possible, but depending on the document it might not be all that practical.

Any thoughts on this question would be appreciated. I'm not sure how much interest there would be in this but figured I'd ask. She is bilingual in French, so if there is anything requiring either language it is a possibility.

If you want anything in particular transcribed, feel free to email transcribeittoday at gmail.com, and she will get back to you.

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Reply by afrim 2021-04-17 21:08:23

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OCR is a viable solution for most of the documents that people will need transcribed/converted in a daily basis. It just saves you time. When my brother did this for me, we were so thankful when we discovered ABBYY Fine Reader. It was 2011 then, and my English was so limited and I didn't know about these technologies. Hadn't we had Fine reader then, my brother would have given up doing this for me as it was so challenging to type all my English exercises and reading sections. So I would say, OCR programmes are a vital solution if one is getting into transcription or document conversion. In some cases the person doing this job will only need to reformat the document cause 99% of the text will be correct.
Then of course if the person doing this job is taking printed documents, a scanner will be needed, and I highly recommend any book scanners from Plustek

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Reply by GrannyCheeseWheel 2021-04-17 21:11:57

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Anything that isn't critical, I will just use OCR for; anything that is, I wouldn't trust someone I don't know to do the job.

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Reply by Munawar 2021-04-17 23:26:09

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Agreed with @3. I was thinking it would be really cool to have my w-2 form transcribed since I need to fill out my taxes, but not sure if I'd like a stranger to do it instead of a tax professional or someone I know personally.

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Reply by Blind angel 444 2021-04-18 00:47:37

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@Munawar, this should be helpful for you and others.
https://www.applevis.com/forum/ios-ipad … blind-user

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Reply by Sanctum 2021-04-18 03:40:24

  • Registered: 2021-02-13
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@ number 1, that's so nice that she is ofering transcriptions services. and even better, by no charging anything!
I  think this would be useful.

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