I have made what may be an important discovery. I call it the $80
personal reader. Here is the tail.
I have book looking into the Kurzweil 3000 Professional reading
software for Macintosh to see if it could be used by the blind with
VoiceOver to provide similar functionality on the mac that Kurweil
1000 does on the PC. The answer to that question appears to be yes,
by the way.
In the process of doing this testing I got a Canon CanoScan LiDE 60
flatbed scanner it cost less than $80. This scanner is powered by the
USB cable which is real nice.This scanner has four buttons on the
front that can be programmed. They come pre-configured with a program
called CanoScan Toolbox X. This program is not very VoiceOver
friendly but once you have it installed you don't really need to
worry about it much.
One of the buttons on the scanner, third in for the left, makes PDF
files and stores them in your Pictures directory under directories
named by date. There is an option in CanoScan Toolbox X to have an
external program open the PDF files after scanning I set this to
Preview. Now comes the fun part. The default settings for these PDF
files it to make them "searchable" which means that the software runs
an OCR process on each page. The results of this is a PDF file you
can READ WITH VOICEOVER.
Now there are a few minor matters. You must place the page into the
scanner with the top of the page at the front of the scanner. The OCR
doesn't seem to work with and upside down or sideways page. CanoScan
Toolbox X is just barely VoiceOver compatible. In particular while it
seems to let your review a dialog which would let you scan several
pages to a single PDF CanoScan Toolbox X will not let you click the
"Next" or "Finish" buttons with the usual VoiceOver keys space bar.
However it will place the VoiiceOver cursor on the Next and Finished
buttons. You can then use the control-option-command F5 command to
move the arrow cursor to the VoiceOvver cursor and then shift-control-
option spacebar to click the mouse button on the button you want. The
default is finished so if you are reading only a single page just
pressing return will do.
Then, provided you have preview set up as the external application in
CanoScan Toolbox X, Preview will open and you can read the scanned
pages normally with Voice Over. It works with multi-column text such
as magazines and it stores a picture perfect version of what was
scanned something Kurzeil 1000 for Windows can not do and which is
very important to dyslexics like me who want to see the pictures as
well as hear the text. Pictures seem to give it no trouble at all.
Further once you have these PDF files you can move them to any other
Mac to read or even read them on a PC with Jaws or WindowEyes.
Mary Beth: If we could get with Canon and get a VoiceOver version of
this software put together Apple would have a very powerful tool
indeed. This solution is already nearly 80% of software that cost
thousands of dollars. If it could do page rotation it would be very
useful. I can't stress this enough this is a major find in my mind.
An $80 personal reader attached to a computer which has a built in
screen reader! At lang las the blind and dyslexics would have tool
they need at a reasonable price. I would urge Apple in the strongest
way possible to contact Canon to have the minor changes made to make
this fully functional.
Greg Kearney
- The $80 personal reader Greg Kearney
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