Hi All, I use the Prizmo app with my iPhone 4's camera to OCR text. However, recently I've been using a wireless scanner on my network that I control with an iOS app named VueScan Mobile to send scans to the camera roll on my iPhone or iPad, and then using OCR apps like Prizmo or TextGrabber that can import images from the camera roll to OCR. This works pretty nicely when I'm at my home network and want to get an OCR of a simple text document without going go my computer. Now the gotcha is that the all-in-one printer/scanner/copier that I'm using for this is the HP Photosmart D110a, which is one of the first iOS AirPrint enabled printers. And I have to say that I think this is a terrible printer to set up from the point of view of accessibility, since it uses a touch screen with no tactile features or audio feedback to select options and input the IP address information. On the other hand, once it is set up (which you cannot do without sighted assistance), you can work with this wirelessly as well as through a USB connection. I'm using this printer because it was free with a MacBook Air purchase that was made last year. I think that Apple has discontinued the free or $99 reimbursement printer program since then.
If you want to check whether this app will work with your wireless printer, you can check the listed supported printers at the developer's "VueScan Mobile" web page at: http://www.hamrick.com/mob.html Alternatively, you can download the free version of the VueScan Mobile app, which does not have support for the high resolution option that is needed for OCR, but which will otherwise work. In any case, this HP D110a printer, along with a number of other HP, Canon, and Epson wireless printers, is automatically detected when you start up the VueScan Mobile iOS app. There's a very simple "VueScan Mobile" screen with an "Options" button and a "Scan" button at the bottom of the page. The "Options" button lets you select the scanner (in case there is more than one on your network), choose the resolution (which you want to be "high" for OCR), select the scan mode ("text" for OCR, but also settings for black and white or color photo), and an "append" switch button that can be set to "on" for multipage documents. So to access the setup options, I would do a four finger tap on the bottom half of the screen to go to the last element -- the "Scan" button -- and flick left to the "Options" button and double tap. (These two buttons are just above the "Home" button, but you have to move up and to the left to get to the "Options" button, or up and to the right from the "Home" button to get to the "Scan" button directly by touch.) There is one unlabeled button in the top right corner of the "VueScan Mobile" screen, which is an info button to access the "About" screen with the version number and an option to "Email Problem Report". I use the two finger double tap and hold to label this as "Info". After the triple tone a "Label Element" window should appear that lets you type in your custom label in the text field. Flick right the "Save" button and double tap to save your label. Once you have set up your options, double tap the "Scan" button. It takes maybe 20 seconds for the scan to complete. You won't hear anything announced until the scan is finished, when you'll hear "1 of 1". However, if you do a two-finger flick up read all, you'll get an announcement "in progress" at the end. I just wait now until I hear the "1 of 1". The page with the scanned results has a "Save" button in the top right, which has options for "Camera Roll", "Send Email…", "Print", and "Other…" To OCR the page, you want to choose "Camera Roll", so you can open the jpeg image in an OCR app that lets you select inputs from your camera roll images. The other options will send an email with your image as an attachment, bring up a printer options menu if you have an AirPrint enabled printer on your network, or open the image in another app that is capable of accepting either the PDF or jpeg output. On my devices this defaults to iBooks, but this would simply store an image version of the contents in that app. There are a few other buttons on the scanned output screen. There is a "Scan" button in the top left corner to allow you to return to the "VueScan Mobile" screen for more scanning. At the bottom of the screen, there are three buttons. From left to right these are: "PLCrop" - interactively crop the section of the scanned image (requires vision, so double tap the "Cancel" button if you happened to select this); "PLRotateArrow" -- bring you to a screen with buttons where you can rotate the image by 90 degrees to the right (clockwise) or left (counterclockwise) with buttons at the bottom of the screen labeled "RotateRight" and "RotateLeft"; "UIButtonBarTrash" -- brings up a "Delete Page" option. I would either relabel this last button as "Delete", or just remember that the last element on this page is the button to "delete". If you do not delete the scan, and double tap the "Scan" button to return to the "ViewScan Mobile" screen, there will now be a button in the top left corner of the screen that allows you to return to the scanned page. It will have a name like "Scan" followed by a series of numbers -- for example, "Scan1341865680 1" button, So the procedure I follow, once I've set up the scan options for the ViewScan Mobile app to "high" resolution and "text" is: 1. Open the ViewScan Mobile app 2. Double tap the "Scan" button, which I locate with a four finger tap on the bottom half of the screen to move to the last element 3. When the scan completes after 20 seconds or so, and I hear the "1 of 1" announcement that I am on the scanned screen, double tap the "Save" button in the top right corner and select the "Camera Roll" button. (Note that if you do not find buttons on the screen of scanned output, just double tap in the center of the screen to bring these up. The scanned output screen behaves like ebook reader apps in being able to show you the results with or without superposed controls.) 4. Either single click the home button to go to the home screen or, if I've recently used an OCR app like Prizmo or TextGrabber, double click the home button to go to the App Switcher to launch my selected OCR app. 5. Assuming that I am using Prizmo for OCR: 5a. I flick right past "Settings" to "Text" and double tap. 5b. On the "Photo" screen I flick right to "Album" and double tap 5c. On the "Photos" screen I flick right to "Camera Roll" and double tap 5d. On the "Camera Roll" screen I do a four finger tap in the bottom half of the screen to go to the last element. VoiceOver will announce this as "IMG" followed by a sequence of numbers and the word "image". I double tap this entry and am returned to the "Photo" screen. 5e. On the "Photo" screen I flick right to the "Next" button in the top right corner and double tap. 5f. Prizmo enters the "Processing" screen and after 1 or 2 seconds I'm taken to the "Edit" screen. You can double tap in the text area to make corrections and then double tap the "Done" button. Or you can just double tap the "Next" button again in the top right corner. 5g. On the "Text" screen there is a bottom row of buttons with options like "Read", "Translate", "Copy", "Album", and "Mail". If you do a three finger swipe to the right, you'll get the second page of options, which include "Dropbox", "Evernote", and "CloudApp". Some of these you won't use ("Read" lets you purchase a voice to read your scanned text -- but since we have VoiceOver I never bother with that; on the previous version of Prizmo "MobileMe" was also an option that appeared before "Dropbox", but it was removed.) I don't use the "Save" button in the top right corner, which stores the results in the I also tried this with TextGrabber and got slightly better results from the OCR. The steps for TextGrabber are: 6. Assuming I am using TextGrabber for OCR: 6a. Double tap the "Album" button in the bottom right corner of the screen 6b. On the "Photos" screen I flick right to "Camera Roll" and double tap 6c. On the "Camera Roll" screen I do a four finger tap in the bottom half of the screen to go to the last element. VoiceOver will announce this as "IMG" followed by a sequence of numbers and the word "image". I double tap this entry and am returned to a screen where VoiceOver announces "CropClipper, dimmed". (This is for interactive cropping of the image, which requires vision, and I don't use.) 6d. I double tap the "Read" button in the bottom right corner of the screen. (This is also the last element in the screen, if you want to use a four-finger tap on the bottom half of the screen to navigate.) 6e. The image is taken through OCR, and the process takes a few seconds longer than with Prizmo. If I touch the bottom of the screen while this is in progress, I'll hear VoiceOver say "Recognition" 6f. On the "TextGrabber" screen I can read the text with a two finger flick up "read all" or I can double tap the center of the field to edit the text, then double tap the "Done" button in the top right corner of the screen to exit this mode. 6g. I double tap the "Menu" button in the bottom right corner of the screen. The menu options are redrawn on the bottom of the screen, so to access them I move my finger up the screen from the bottom right corner to "Dictionary" or more usually, I'll move my finger up from the "History" button inthe bottom left corner to "Copy" and double tap to copy the text to the clipboard, Then I can paste it into any other app. Other options that you can navigate to (in the 8 options over the bottom half of the screen from the menu are: Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Google Search, Copy, Mail, SMS, and Dictionary (only works if you bought the ABBYY Lingvo dictionaries application). Overall, I've had the best results with OCR (directly to my iPhone 4, not via a scanner), with Prizmo and ABBYY TextGrabber. Prizmo seem more robust, in that it can more easily tolerate slight misalignments in camera images and still give good results, where TextGrabber requires more precise positioning and holding of the camera. If you want to learn to use one of these OCR apps with VoiceOver without vision, then I also think that Prizmo is the best app to use to train yourself. I've also used the ZoomReader app with voice control enabled, just using VoiceOver to OCR. (This app is designed for low vision users, but in versions following the original release they enabled VoiceOver support). One distinct difference about this app when used to OCR images from the camera roll, is that the images have to be correctly oriented (with top of page at the top of the image), in order for the OCR to work. This limitation doesn't hold true for Prizmo or TextGrabber; I can rotate the image I use from the camera roll by 90 degrees in any direction and still get the OCR results provided the text in my image is well aligned with the edges of the picture frame. This also means that I don't have to worry about whether I scanned a page upside down with the VueScan Mobile app before I send it to the camera roll for use with an OCR app like Prizmo or TextGrabber, but I do have to worry about this if I use ZoomReader from the camera roll. Presumably this is because ZoomReader is designed for low vision users, and they use the extra information about text orientation in the, which can determined if you have vision, to try to get a better OCR solution. So a low vision user might find that ZoomReader works better as an OCR tool. The VueScan Mobile + OCR combination via either Prizmo or TextGrabber on an iPhone or iPad isn't meant to challenge use of a scanner on your computer. It's simply that this combination is good enough for many purposes without having to go to my computer. And this should be usable by all the people who have difficulty using an OCR app like Prizmo and taking pictures with the camera. Since the images are relayed from your scanner, and are sent to your camera roll, this should be usable on devices with either a poor camera or no camera, provided you can load up the OCR app on that device. (I know this works with Prizmo, because I tried loading up the app on a first generation iPad to find out how well it could OCR screen captures. The answer is, not particularly very well since the resolution of the iPad 1 screen isn't that good. However, images sent from the VueScan Mobile app using a supported wireless printer should have better resolution.) For those of you who are interested in trying this app, here's a link to the URL of the free version of the VueScan Mobile app: • VueScan Mobile Free by Hamrick Software (free, but does not support the high resolution option needed for OCR) http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vuescan-mobile-free/id486283293?mt=8 You can check whether your wireless scanner device is recognized and supported by the free version of the app. If it is, you can get the full version of the VueScan Mobile app: • VueScan Mobile by Hamrick Software ($4.99) http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vuescan-mobile/id450984682?mt=8 This app is available internationally. Again, you can read more about this app and the supported HP, Canon, and Epson devices. I'd love to know about more accessible wireless scanners or all-in-one devices that include a scanner. And Scott Howell gets the blame for bringing this app to my attention *grin*. He mentioned it in a viphone list post last year. HTH. Cheers, Esther -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
