Hi Greg
Yep, those Canoscan scanners are really awesome. I've got a lide 500F
here and I love it. I discovered this approach a few years back when
I was still in high school, I was looking around for a small scanner
and happened upon the Canon Lide 30. Back then I was using a Windows
laptop, since OS X wasn't useable by blind people at the time. That
little scanner coupled with Finereader OCR worked wonders and sure
impressed the hell out of everyone who saw it. These little scanners
are just one of the reasons, apart from the political ones, that I'll
never buy an overpriced item like the Kurzweil Reader--not only that,
but I don't want to own a device with NFB in its name. Anyway, I've
rambled a bit. But if anyone is looking for an economical portable
reading solution, these scanners are well worth looking into. I'm
going to look into pen scanners as well and see if any of them can be
used by the blind--they'd be even more portable.
On Sep 25, 2006, at 7:40 PM, Greg Kearney wrote:
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
