As a parent supporting a student with a print disability, I have learned to work with a variety of formats and restrictions.

My student has had 5 years of successful use of Kurzweil and would like to continue to use it. Use of Kurzweil is an important part of the academic support ordered by the clinical psychologists who have worked with Michael.

The program works with PDFs without difficulty but is unable to process your "secured" files. This appears to be due to printing restrictions preventing it from printing to the KESI virtual printer.

His college, Whitman college, has provided a membership in 123books for Michael. It was their belief that your organization would provide a viable approach. Is there a solution to this problem?

Or do I need to go back to the college and tell them that we will need to obtain unsecured PDFs from the publishers as we have in the past.

First, here is a brief description of how the KESI Virtual Printer (KVP) works as stated by Kersweil here:

QUOTE:
Acrobat files are opened using a mechanism known as the KESI Virtual Printer. Instead of directly opening an Acrobat file, the Kurzweil 1000 and Kurzweil 3000 send the file to Adobe's Acrobat Reader program, and tell it to print the file to the KESI Virtual Printer. The KESI Virtual Printer behaves like a real printer, but instead of printing on paper, it makes an image file. That image file is then sent to the Kurzweil 1000 or Kurzweil 3000 to be recognized.
A failure in any step in this procedure can cause [an error].

121Files are set to allow the use Screen Readers and other Accessibility tools. However, the KVP process described above is not allowing the Adobe authorized File-Open security plug-in to first authenticate and decrypt the 121File. The 121File would first need to be opened as normal, and then accessed by the Accessibilty application of choice.

Second, the KVP will re-read, or re-OCR whatever file it is attempting to read. When KVP creates an “image file … to be recognized,” it ignores the original text (possibly contained in a text layer) 121Books.org has already created. This may lead to a significant decrease in accuracy than the provided 121File. This decrease as partly b/c a pdf file is like virtually printed paper(s). Making a copy of a copy will result in a loss of clarity. Even our 1st generation 121File is of a lower clarity than the originally scanned pages 121Books.org uses to first OCR and edit a book prior to creating the PDF file.

May we recommend taking a moment to learn to use the free built-in Read Out Loud Tool included with Adobe Reader and Acrobat. Or first opening the 121File with Acrobat/Reader and then printing it to KVP (121Files are set to allow printing).

In my original post I should have made clear that I had also opened the file with Adobe reader successfully entered name and password and cleared that step and the file was visible onscreen unencrypted. I then tried to print to the KESI virtual printer. Adobe Reader crashed repeatedly at that point and no output to the KESI virtual printer was produced on many attempts.

Thus this "work around" doesn't work.

Regarding your concerns regarding loss of accuracy using the KESI virtual printer, I would only note that I have worked quite successfully with unsecured PDFs from publishers for 5 years with Kurzweil and not had any trouble with text recognition.

As I tried to make clear in my original posting, Adobe Reader alone is not an adequate support for my student. The suggestion to use it instead is NOT helpful.

I am hopeful of a more helpful response from you.

If Reader is "crashing" this is possibly due to printing an entire 121book to KVP. Have you tried printing 10 - 20 pages at a time, especially with a large textbook?

We respect and acknowledge that our chosen solution of PDF files is not ideal for all print disabled persons. We hope to satisfy those persons who RFB&D, Braille, Publishers, or other audio tape providers are unable to serve. We consider our primary benefit to be computer based files with on screen re-sizeable text and the preservation of images. Our relatively fast production of alternatively formatted books that are unavailable from other sources is also a main benefit of our service.

We consider reading text aloud as a set of additional benefits availble from within Reader/Acrobat, and we enable this feature with external third party screen readers.

We will happily work to assist you and your child with this issue or any other that may arise. But if it is determined that another provider is best for your child's individual needs and education, 121Books.org will hapilly support this decision also.

Provide a title you are experiencing this difficulty with and we will provide you with an UNencrypted version. This will establish if this is a result of our chosen DRM system.

As this exchange is moving into more specifics, I will reply using the contact us page.

Hello everybody, my name is Peter, and I'm glad to join this pretty forum.
Just wanted to say Hi to everyone, hope to become an active member and to make a lot of new friends.

regards, Peter