Martin McCormick wrote: > I've been trying to do the impossible, more like the > impractical, for some time now so I need a knowledge infusion. > > I want to be able to read the VGA output of a computer, > do OCR on it and have ASCII text. > > As a computer user who happens to be blind, one of the > most frustrating issues is the fact that except for expensive > servers, none of these boxes output any machine readable text > when booting up or in setup mode such as when the coin cell that > powers the CMOS BIOS gives up the ghost and one needs to do a > setup on it, etc.
The parts that you will need: - a video capture device. I don't know about VGA input, but I do know that HDMI video capture devices can be had for prices ranging from $25 to $250 or so. - transformation from video to still images can be done via the package imagemagick - OCR can be done with the package tesseract-ocr In future, if you can arrange to buy used server hardware instead of desktop-class machines, you'll have access to various IPMI (DRAC, ILO) serial console systems which include BIOS access. -dsr-
