Tuesday 12 May 2015

How to Register for a Tesco Account using the Screen Reader Jaws

Welcome to my video. In this video, I will demonstrate how to register for a Tesco account when using Internet Explorer and the screen reader, Jaws. 



Start of Transcript

Hello, everyone and welcome to this video.

In this video I demonstrate how to register for an account at Tesco.com so that you can use the site to shop on-line.

To do this I am using the screen reader Jaws and Internet Explorer 11 (the desktop edition) in on a Windows 8.1 laptop.

Now as you listen to the video, you will hear two voices- my voice and Jaws' voice. We will try and not talk over one another.

Tesco.com is a huge on-line shop with hundreds of thousands of goods available to buy. That can make the website very intimidating to use with a screen reader.

At every stage of the process, I will tell you which keys on your keyboard you need to press in order to make this website accessible with Jaws.

Most people I suspect use Tesco.com to do their weekly food or grocery shop which helps to narrow our focus.

So let's get up to the address bar and Type in Tesco.com into the address bar.

If you want to shop at Tesco.com you need to register for an account. There is no way a round this.

To start, we need to select the "Sign in" link.

To do this press the INSERT key and the F7 key together, which brings up a list of Links. The Sign in link should be the link highlighted at the top, so we just press the enter key.

I am going to presume that you want to shop for groceries and so press the down arrow twice and press enter.

To register for an account, you need to provide a few details. Press the TAB key 5 times and then start typing your email address.

So I typed my email address in and then pressed the TAB key to go to the "confirm email" box and I re-typed the same email address in.

I am going to press the TAB key once more and type in my postcode.

If you have a Tesco's Clubcard, Press the TAB key once more and type in your Clubcard number.

Or if you don't have a Tesco's Clubcard, press the TAB key twice and then press the Spacebar once. When your account is created, you will be given a Clubcard number.

Now press the TAB key once more to select the "Register" button and then press the Enter key.

If you haven't got a Clubcard, Jaws will read out a message prompting you to add your Clubcard number if you have one.

So, if you haven't got one, just press the Enter key.

Another registration page loads.

Now since most of this information on this page is highly personal, I will not be filling it in. However, I will still take you through it, step by step, or keyboard shortcut by keyboard shortcut.

The first piece of information you need to input is your "Title".

Press the letter "e" and then press Shift + Tab keys together

Press the down arrow key until the correct title comes up for you.

Once you have selected the right title, press TAB and then type in your first name.

Press the TAB key twice and type in your surname.

Now press the TAB key twice more and you will need to use the down arrow to find your address.

Once you have done this, press the TAB key once more and type in a "nickname" for the address. For most of us, it will be "home".

Press the TAB key once more and enter a daytime telephone number.

Once you have done this, press the TAB key once more and enter your mobile number.

Press the TAB key three times and type in a password for your account. It must contain a capital letter, a number, a lowercase letter and a special character (such as £).

Press the TAB key once and type your password in again.

Press the TAB key once more and you can select the viewing options for the Tesco website. The five alternatives are; standard, low visibility, screen reader, keyboard and colour blind.

Select the option that you want by pressing on the down arrow.

Press the TAB key once more to select how you heard about Tescos. Make your selection by pressing the down arrow.

Press the TAB key four more times to agree to the terms and conditions. Then press enter.

Provided that the website accepts all the information that you have given to it, you have successfully registered and because I haven't filled in all the boxes, that is why I have a message from the webpage up in front of me.

However it should be different for you.

You can now sign in to Tesco.com and start to shop.

I will show you how to sign in using keyboard shortcuts in my next video.

Thank you for watching this video. If you have any comments, please leave them in the selection below the video.

End of Transcript

Monday 11 May 2015

PDF to Word Conversion- An On-line Test

Hello, everyone!  Welcome to this 14 minute video.



What You Will Learn by Watching This Video.
1. Which of the following websites converts a complicated, 3 page PDF document into a Word file that can be edited.
The websites are;
PDFtoWord.com
PDFonline.com/pdf-to-word-converter
Freepdfconvert.com/pdf-word
Docs.zone/pdf-to-word
convertonlinefree.com/pdftoworden.aspx

In this video I visit 5 different PDF to Word Conversion websites, that are free to use!

I upload a complicated PDF file that contains text, graphics, photos and colours to see what the converting power of each website is like.

Start of Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to this video.

In this video I will compare 5 websites that claim to be able to convert pdf files to word files- convert a document that is read only into a document that can be edited!

All the websites that I show you claim to convert the files for free.

To make it a fairer test as possible, I will use the same pdf file on all sites.
The PDF that I have chosen to use is here on the screen in front of you and it's about the Blitz in the Second World War. So let's have a quick look at it.

It is quite a complex PDF that contains text, photos and graphics. Now ideally I was looking for something with a table in it but I did not want to spend any more time looking for what I thought was going to be the perfect PDF file.

Now, this original, The original file was 20 pages long but for the purposes of this conversion, I cut it down to three pages just to make sure that I wouldn't have any trouble with any of the on-line sites.

Let's go through our files one by one, sorry our sites one by one.
Now the first one here is pdftoword.com.

This is an on-line tool although you need to provide your email address so that your converted file can be sent to you. And so I am just about to put in my email address here.

It is made by a company who makes a powerful piece of PDF editing software (similar to Abbyy Fine Reader) which has been the subject one of one of my previous videos and of course they advertise this software on the webpage quite a lot.

There is no obvious details on any limits of using the on-line, free, PDF to Word converter. As you are doing this, make sure that you don't tick that box there because they will just start sending you lots of emails if that it the case.

So let's have a look up here, so what we want is we want to convert a PDF into Word and you can see that you can do other types of conversions on this page as well. It is not just PDF to Word there are lots of different conversions that you can do but I want to focus on this video just on PDF to word and once you have selected the kind of conversion that you want, you then select a file, so lets have a look.
Hopefully, there's our..and so we have told it thats the World War Two Blitz PDF that we want and now lets tell it to convert.
Now you can see that the conversion is taking a bit of time, probably taken round about a minute OK and what happens is that it sends us, it sends the converted file to us. So let's go back to my Inbox, here we go in my Inbox this is the conversion, my converted file.  So I opened up the email.
And so here you go this is the converted file that it is converted from,.
You can see that actually, it is pretty good in terms of the likeness of it to the original. So that terrific news there isn't it? OK, so that is PDFtoWord.com.
So let's just close that there.
Now, our next website that we are going to for the conversion is PDFonline PDF to Word Converter.
So, here you go, there's the address of it in the address bar and right here we are going to upload a file to convert.
Now for this site you do not need to provide your email address as it is done for you on a while you wait basis.
So, let's have a look, take the original file again and you can see how the while you wait basis works.
Again it will probably take about a minute.
OK and that's not good, is it?
Let's have another go at that.
See if we can make that work again.
Ok so what we are going to need to do we are going to need to move on from that site.
So lets go to our third our third conversion website.
This is if you have a look at the address bar freepdfconvert.com/ pdf-to-word. On tis site again you need to provide your email address so let's let's go and choose the file and it actually says in terms of providing your email address its optional so let's tell it to convert it right away and I think it will be done while we wait.
And we can see what's happened here, let's download this.
So it is a, it was a three page document that I uploaded to the site, here we go, and it has only done two pages because it is trying to get us to sign up to the website to get the third page done.
So that is something to bear in mind if you want to use this website or consider this website. The conversion itself you can see in front of us here, again is very close to the original.
If I just move the cursor around to show that we can actually edit different parts of this document. Yes there are just two pages. So that is freepdfconvert.com is going to restrict you to two pages, unless you sign up.
OK so lets go for our fourth website which is up here docs.zone/pdf-to-word.
So, here we go, let's choose our PDF, once more and you get a choice here of what type of conversion you actually want it to do.
Now I am just going to stick to the flowing, what it calls flowing cause it says that that is ideal for most documents.
Ok, so let's check that out. We didn't have to give our email address to this and there we go, very very quick conversion.
It is done there and so let's download it and then open it up in Word and here we go we can see that it is another very, very accurate conversion.
It look as though I can edit all parts of it.
Let's just flash the original up again. So here's the original that we sent to every site for conversion.
And this is the converted copy from Docs Zone.
So that is another good conversion.
And then finally for this video, I am going to go to a website which is convertonlinefree.com.
And you can see that this website is a little more cluttered. It seems to be more information up on it and there are definitely more ads on it. just to confuse us.
So what we do here is go to the browse button and then we choose our original PDF and then next to the browse button is the convert button.
There is no email address to put in. so we just straight away we open it and again, there's another very, very good conversion of a three page, of our three page PDF. So just to show for small files, perhaps, these websites, these free websites can do a great conversion. We can get the PDF into Word and start to move it around and edit it.

OK, everyone, thank you for watching.

If you have any comments please leave them in the comments section below, or any questions please ask me in the comments section below.

If you have experience of other online sites or the sites that I have shown today then please let me know as well.

I'd be really interested to hear from you.
Thank you for watching.

 
End of Video Transcript





 

Tuesday 5 May 2015

Abbyy Fine Reader 12- Convert Your PDFs into Editable Text!

On this page, you will find a video that I have created that highlights the main features of Abbyy Fine Reader 12 which is a piece of software that converts PDFs into editable text. Beneath the video is a full transcript of the video.


Start of Transcript

Hello and welcome to this video.

In this video I will provide a quick overview of Abbyy Fine Reader 12- Pro which is a piece of OCR software. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and one of its most common uses is to be able to convert text from a paper document (via a scanner) or convert text from a photo or PDF into text that can be edited.

This is an important task for many businesses and schools. It is a very important task for people who have a visual impairment, because once the conversion is done, they can then access the text on their PC, Mac or tablet via a screen reader.

So, I am on the company web page and I will quickly take you through the features of the software.

Just to say that it costs £99 or you can trial it for 30 days and scan up to  100 pages.

Edit a Scanned Document or an Image PDF

Scans and converts image documents (such as PDFs) into editable text with a recognition accuracy of 99.8%.

Recognises 190 languages.

Extracts text and tables from selected areas.

Creates searchable pdfs

Easily converts pdfs into editable formats

Creates e-books for reading on the go.

Sends and retrieves documents from the cloud.

Has a Windows 8 look and feel.

Reads text on digital photographs

Captures content from screenshots.

End of Transcript