Hello Paul, I recall that you have an iPhone 3GS. The effectiveness of an OCR app is set by the camera on your iOS device. I get good results with Prizmo on an iPhone 4. I think it might be more problematic on an iPhone 3GS. I've also found Prizmo to be the most robust program to use if you are taking an image for OCR with your device. I've also used ABBYY TextGrabber, but you have to be more precise about your alignment to use this. Both these programs will work for many other languages besides English. And I think Perfect OCR was the first such app I tried to use, by the way, and I tested it on French text!
Prizmo and ABBYY TextGrabber will recognize text that is upside down or rotated by 90 degrees, provided you have aligned your camera well. (I don't remember trying that with Perfect OCR, but other OCR apps will not necessarily work unless the text is correctly oriented.) It is easier to get started with Text Detective and get some results. I think one reason is that you hold the iPhone in landscape mode when you take your picture, while the page is in portrait mode. This makes it easier to keep the camera aligned, and also you can use the edge of the page as a reference guide. The issue for me is that this only gives me a part of a page, and no easy way to combine the results, whereas with Prizmo or TextGrabber I can get a whole page in one shot. But this works very well if you need to read the address information on a letter or some specific part of a page. I'd also guess that low vision users might like this app a lot. It helps that this was designed for blind users, so usage is simple. With Prizmo you double tap the "next" button a few times, because you skip over the screens that allow for interactive manipulation of the image, such as cropping, before sending to OCR. There's a user guide for Prizmo at the AppleVis web site. HTH. Cheers, Esther <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to mac-access@mac-access.net You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/maillist.xml> The Mac-Access mailing list is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free! Please remember to update your membership options periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/>
