----- Original Message -----
From: Susan Henderson
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Saturday, August 07, 2010 12:05 PM
Subject: [coataccess] iPhone App - Say Text



From the Australia Media Access newsletter:

http://www.audiodescription.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&v
iew=article&id=1098:free-accessible-iphone-app-turns-documents-in
to-text


Free accessible iPhone app turns documents into text


People who are blind or vision impaired will now have access to a 
free iPhone application that allows them to take a picture of a 
document and have it read out.
Produced by DocScanner,  SayText is specifically designed for 
people who are blind or vision impaired and uses Optical 
Character Recognition (OCR).  This is a technology that takes an 
image or picture of a document and electronically translates it 
into text.

This text can then be read out using Apple’s inbuilt screen 
reader VoiceOver.

When you take a picture of a document, a beep tells you when the 
whole document is in the picture, and the camera will shoot 
automatically when focused.

Once the picture is taken, the OCR process will start 
automatically.  When the process is finished, you can tap the 
screen to listen to the document.

You can watch a video of a person using SayText on YouTube.

Our own hands-on testing has yielded mixed results.  For one, we 
could not get our iPhone to beep when the document was in focus – 
at a guess this could be because the camera could never achieve 
full focus.  One document that we scanned (repeatedly) yielded 
very poor quality text.  There was a lot of gibberish, and very 
few words were detected correctly.  A different document however 
resulted in text that was very close to the original.  Other 
users have had similar experiences.

Despite this, DocScanner should be applauded for not only 
releasing this application free of charge, but also customising 
it to be used by people who are blind or vision impaired.

You can download the SayText app now from the Apple iTunes store.








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