I do read all cases cover to cover but not providing OCR-enabled reports affects people like me as well. Trying to draw straight horizontal highlights in Adobe is an absolute pain in the ass and this is one of the reasons behind why I chose to post under this particular pseudonym. A person realises how much they take the ability to select and highlight text for granted after having to go through even one SCC report.

Oh yes they did. The one who tried to talk with them was Rahul Bajaj, the first blind Indian Rhodes Scholar (mods, this is a matter on public record, please publish). It ended up becoming a Twitter fight between him and senior SCC Online reps. Their behaviour was disgusting. Later, Bajaj told an American journalist about improvements to the SCC Online website which, he said, were likely byproducts of improvements at other things than accessibility, with the fact that they had improved accessibility being entirely coincidental. Evidently, SCC Online cares as little about disabled people now as they did then. You have only to search his (Rahul Bajaj's) Twitter profile to see what happened.

DW kid, this is an IT technicality, lots of people who've been in the legal profession in multiple countries (including British and U.S. Supreme Court judges) don't know what it means. So just find out by reading on and don't be too hard on yourself for not knowing before.

1. What: OCR-enabled is when the PDF can be read as typed text (like the text of this comment), rather than as an image-based PDF.

2. Disproportionately bad impacts it has on people:

(a) A comment above has described difficulties with marking/annotating non-OCR-enabled documents. That person has explained it well, so I can't do better than quote what s/he said: "Trying to draw straight horizontal highlights in Adobe is an absolute pain in the ass and this is one of the reasons behind why I chose to post under this particular pseudonym. A person realises how much they take the ability to select and highlight text for granted after having to go through even one SCC report."

(b) Not enabling it means that blind people can't access such PDFs at all. SCC Online knows about that (they have been told multiple times), but they choose not to act, which is entirely on them.

Some differently abled students had asked SBA and UGC (as well I guess) to specifically direct all teachers to not give SCC copies but only manupatra copy or other OCR enabled copies as reading materials for the sake of accessibility. I don't think that was implemented back then. Nevertheless, SB the labour law professor and later even RS, the corporate law professor acknowledged this and was sharing accessible copies only. Don't know what is happening now.

No. It has to do with the fact that the True Print is digitally protected so that people cannot tamper with it. You can open a Manu PDF on Adobe Pro or most professional PDF apps and directly edit the text. The True Print is protected so this does not happen. To get it to OCR you need to first remove this protection. What you do is you open it in your PDF Reader App and press the Print Button (not the export as) and then save it as a PDF using your PCs PDF Printer Driver. The PDF output of that will have the digital protection stripped from it and you can do as you please.

What exact risk has that caused, tell me? Who has the time to go about editing judgments? You really think people will go about editing Fairchild v Glenhaven Funeral Services? Those are authentic versions of the judgments from the law reports. Anybody that knows anything of those legal systems will know that versions circulating around elsewhere will not be as authentic as the ones on Westlaw or Lexis. They have made a clear choice to tilt the balance a little in favour of accessibility. Either tell me of a way that any blind person using the typical screen readers can read a secured document, which is also the most authentic copy of the judgment, or this debate really isn't worth having. Remember the reality: blind people are everywhere in the legal profession - from law firms, to in house, to advocates doing litigation, to regulatory compliance, to academia. We aren't going anywhere and we deserve equal access to the same content that the sighted have access to, on the same terms as sighted people.

Oh, you got me wrong. I agree with you about the accessibility requirement being primary over any concern for manipulation of the judgement text that can be cross-checked quite easily. I just wanted to point out a technical fact when someone wrote that the PDFs from Westlaw etc. cannot be edited, that's all. Given the huge amount of discrimination that the visually challenged people already face in legal education and profession in this country, I would support whatever it takes to help them be treated equitably.

Finally some good conversation on a legitimate topic. While we are at it, can we also please discuss the shoddy quality of judgement writing (unreasonable length, pointless obiter dicta, the circular act of declaring your interpretation/finding and treating that declaration as its own reasoning), terrible formatting of those said judgements (arbitrary selection of typefaces and their sizes, paragraph spacing, layout etc.), and the lack of common courtesy to provide syllabus for judgements, not even for cases involving constitutional/statutory interpretation. On these issues, at least, SCI can learn from SCOTUS.

Stop being so insecure. Last time I checked, Indians and Americans are members of the same species. Nothing wrong in using each other’s words so long as the meaning is clear. You knew very well what I meant by “syllabus” but you still have to waste your and my time by engaging in this needless and foolish exercise.

I believe 'headnote' is originally British terminology (it is certainly the term they have been using for a long while). Some people tend to think that the use of Americanisms 'contaminates' (or somehow dilutes the quality of) our (in some ways similar-to-British) legal system's discourse. The logic behind this thinking is not very clear to me, TBH.

Thanks for your comment. I wonder if these people are also bothered when Indian judges beg, borrow, and steal American jurisprudence in their judgements. As for the fear of contamination, they should worry more about the air they breathe and the water they drink because it is more likely that they are already contaminated. It is nonsensical to use a concept in science like "contamination" when talking about the human behaviour. The science of genetics has already proved that there is no pure race of humans. And human languages are living endorsements of eclecticism. As such, there is no pure Indian legal disourse or, for that matter, a pure American or British legal discourse. Yes, there are unique histories and politics embedded in each of them, but the act of thinking and the generality of circumstances in which it happens remains the same.

It's a horrible product that is milking its monopoly status. Their interface is clunky and old. Their search is so bad that it's not worth writing about in the age of ChatGPT. They are very good about charging for their products. After paying 35K, they will ask you more to access headnotes of HC judgments. Brace yourself for it.

ABSOLUTELY hate SCC. The format is so difficult that I, as a physically able individual, have so many issues reading through it. I so often get confused about where does the case even start. Pity my differently abled classmates. And professors are just as inconsiderate- they are aware of these issues yet send SCC cases only