Shawn Jordison: Hello and welcome to
the Accessibility Guy channel. Today we're going to be going
over the scan and OCR feature built into Adobe Acrobat. This
is ideal for situations where you have a PDF that has an image
in it, and you need to recognize the text on that image. This
feature is often overlooked within Adobe Acrobat. And what
I've noticed is that many people want to immediately go to more
advanced OCR tools like Abby fine reader, or Omni page, which
I have videos for in the rest of my channel. But again, today
we're going to focus on scanning and OCR and within Adobe Acrobat
Now the goal of using this feature is to perform OCR on any
images that might be in the document. To produce live
selectable text, I have a sample document open right now with an
image in it that has a whole bunch of text. Now, this is
automatically going to fail accessibility best practices,
because we want to avoid using images of text. So the best and
quickest method to perform OCR on this document using Adobe
Acrobat is to run the scan and OCR tool. So to do that, I'm
going to select the Tools button. And under Create and Edit, I
want to ensure that I have added my scan and OCR tool to my quick
menu on the right hand side. Now there is an important aspect to
this specific feature, you do need to have the Adobe Acrobat
Pro DC version of Adobe Acrobat in order to have access to this
feature. To run the scan and OCR tool, I'm simply going to select
the button. And then I have a couple of options that appear
underneath the main navigation menu. And this is where we can
enhance our scanned documents, we can recognize text, and we
can apply things like Bates numbering, and more advanced
features like cropping and rotating pages. So for this
example, I'm gonna select recognized text in this file.
But before we get to that, I'd like to encourage you to please
subscribe, like and share this video with any of your friends
or colleagues. And then I'm going to select the pages that I
want to perform OCR, what language I want to recognize,
and then I can adjust some of the other settings for this
page. Then to begin, I'm going to select recognize text and
Adobe Acrobat is automatically going to perform this OCR and it
happens very quickly. So in order to test to make sure that
this worked, we want to be able to select any of the text on the
page. And then I'm going to copy using Ctrl C on my keyboard. And
then let's open up notepad. And I'm going to paste my content in
and it appears that everything is working. Now the next goal
that I would have is I actually want to make this document
accessible. It's one thing to perform OCR, but we want to
ensure that we're creating accessible documents whenever we
can. So the next thing that I'm going to begin doing is actually
tagging this document, applying metadata and then testing with
an actual screen reader. If you want to learn more about those
specific things, check out the rest of the videos on my channel
as I will be adding content frequently about accessibility
for Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, PDFs, and general Assistive
Technology. So once again, thank you for watching, and I'll see
you around soon.
