Just to add that the OCR engines on Open Book and K1000 are far superior to
that found on Omnipage and other off-the-shelf products, at least the last
time I checked. Open Book, for example, has three OCR engines, all of
extremely high quality. It uses the fine reader engine as a default, but
you can change it to another engine if that works better for you. Open Book
also has a language analyst feature, which allows the OCR engine to guess at
what words the printed document might be trying to indicate based on known
tenets about the English language. Plus you can tell it to scan in a
variety of different languages so that it will recognize everything from
French to Turkish. This is in addition to all the other features that have
been mentioned. Another cool thing about Open Book, and K1000 may have
this, I'm not sure, is that if you have a PDF document that's just been
scanned and not had OCR applied to it, JAWS will not be able to read it.
But Open Book has an import feature that allows you to send files to it so
it can apply OCR to them. This has saved my behind a few times at work.
Hope this helps!
Catherine Getchell
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Campbell" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2007 11:07 AM
Subject: [VICUG-L] An Interesting Question to Ponder
Hello All:
My boss asked me an interesting question last night that I don't feel I
have a good answer for, so I'm putting it out there to get your
opinions.
For those of you who want or need to be able to scan documents into a
computer so you can read and do other things with them, there are two
specialty software packages, Kurzweil 1000 and Open Book. Also, many
scanners today come with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software
that allows one to scan documents directly into Microsoft Word. This
latter option in terms of price is much cheaper.
The question is this. Assuming that someone has a computer equipped
with the necessary screen reader or screen magnifier, why do you need a
specialty package like Kurzweil 1000 or Open Book instead of just a
scanner and OCR software that scans directly into word? In answering
this, think of the advantages that you believe exist with packages like
Kurzweil 1000 or Open Book. Also, think in terms of someone needing to
purchase these products, how would you justify the cost of one of these
programs if the person has the necessary screen reader or screen
magnifier and a scanner.
I will be looking forward to hearing your responses. If you'd like to
call me and talk with me about this, that would be fine. Otherwise,
e-mail responses are acceptable.
Ray Campbell, Help Desk Technician
Adaptive Technology Center
Chicago Lighthouse for People Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired
1850 W. Roosevelt Road
Chicago, IL 60608
312-997-3651 (Voice/Relay) or
888-825-0080 (voice/Relay)
[log in to unmask]
AIM Screen Name: tclhelp
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