dot story, perhaps?
Seth <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.kde.events |
|---|---|
| Organization | Straight Edge Linux |
| Message-ID | <201108232241.04040.cetx__33007.5689628304$1314174834$gmane$org@straightedgelinux.com> |
I've written up a story, I think it might be appropriate for the dot...or it might not be; I don't know; it's fairly anecdotal. But it is a true story about how Okular in particular is helping my sister, with impaired eye sight, get through university, so I thought it might be something. Attached. -- seth _______________________________________________ This message is from the kde-promo mailing list. Visit https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-promo to unsubscribe, set digest on or temporarily stop your subscription.
dotkde_okularHelpingTheBlind.txt
(text/plain, 2 KB)
Marie Canlon is a PhD student in the literary studies department of an East Coast university in the US. She also has Retinitis Pigmentosa, meaning that her retinas are pigmented when they should be clear; it's a genetic condition that makes it difficult for her to see black-on-white text and small print of any colour. In the USA, Universities are supposed to provide textbooks in alternate formats for people who need other ways to access the required reading material. Her school, however, seems to define this as scanning the textbook into a computer and providing her with a PDF of the scanned pages. Not very helpful, although it does in theory allow Marie to zoom in on the pages and read it as enlarged type. But in practice, since often times the text is blurry, faint, and badly gradiated due to rushed, poor quality photocopies, enlarging the PDF on her screen just results in a larger version of unreadable blurry print. The "right" solution would, of course, be to deliver either an audio version of the text to Marie, or at least a plain text copy so that the text could be cleanly enlarged or read by a screen reader. Enter Okular, the KDE Software used for reading PDFs. By opening the scanned documents in Okular, Marie found that she was able to select areas of the page and copy the contents, but it wasn't just a graphical copy. Okular uses Optical Character Recognition to automatically convert the reading materials to plain text, which she could then open in KWrite or KWord (word processors in KDE's software compilation), enlarge, and read with ease, or even use a screen reader like Flite or Festival to narrate the text to her. It's a true example of Free Software like the KDE Platform providing users the features that they need for not only improved computing, but improved quality of life. And yes, that's what modern technology is supposed to do for us. If your computing environment isn't doing that, it might be time to consider switching over to KDE.