Problems with PDFs

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

One issue 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 converted to an image, not text.

It's not just older, scanned documents, though. Some types of software convert text to images when they generate PDFs, for example word clouds generated by Mentimeter.

How to improve your PDF documents

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a process that converts images to text. It is a technology that is widely used for various purposes. OCR is one of the tools you can use to significantly improve the accessibility of a document, but OCR alone does not fix all accessibility issues.

We recommend two alternatives for using optical character recognition (OCR) of PDF documents when you do not have the original in Word, PowerPoint, etc.

Optical character recognition with Ally
Ally offers OCR as an alternative format. Depending on the content in the PDF file it may be better - and faster - to use optical character recognition (OCR) by saving the document with the OCR alternative format. See how you generate an OCR version of a document under How to generate it with Ally.

Note! The quality of the OCRed version depends on the quality of the original document, so OCR may not function optimally with all types of documents. If the OCR alternative format in Ally does not give you the desired result you can use Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Optical character recognition with Adobe Acrobat Pro
If the OCR alternative format in Ally does not give you the desired result you can use Adobe Acrobat Pro. All students and employees have access to the Pro version of Acrobat via UiO Programkiosk.

Example:

Below is a scanned PDF document showing two pages from a book. Ally has converted the PDF document using OCR. As you can see in the video the usability has been greatly improved after OCR.

The document before OCR:

Example of a document that was scanned and not OCRed

The document after OCR:

Summary of video: The document text has been converted to digital font and the user is highlighting portions of the text with a mouse, which is visible when the highlighted text gets a blue background. Afterwards, the user searches for the word "distribution" in the document and can navigate to where it appears, but this is not very easy to see due to the low quality of the video. The video does not include any speech or sounds.

Benefits

By using OCR as an alternative format with Ally, it:

significantly improves the accessibility of a document for blind and visually impaired users
improves the readability of the document for all users
makes it possible for users to search for words and phrases in the document, copy and paste portions of the text, and highlight or annotate in the document

How to generate it with Ally

Simply find and click on the Ally icon, for example at the top of the webpage or document viewer in Canvas.

1. Pages, Quizzes, Assignments, Discussions and Announcements

The Ally alternative format icon is found at the end of the page title.

A course homepage in Canvas, with a red box indicating where the Ally icon for alternative formats is located.

2. Documents

The Ally alternative format icon is found at the top of the webpage, next to the Download and Info buttons.

Screenshot of document viewer in Canvas with an arrow showing where the Ally icon for alternative formats is located.

More information

Learn more about the OCR alternative format and how to use it with Ally (help.blackboard.com)