Hi Garry, and thanks for a very interesting post. I had heard Baum saying here in the UK a year ago they were working on tackling graphical representations of text on the fly, and clearly something like this is increasingly necessary for screen reader users.
I must go and hear this feature before venturing more comments, but the issue of patents is sure to arrise. No doubt Baum will have aken out patents or have them pending for this inovation. so the question is I think, can anyone else achieve the same thing by different means? Ray. Ray Gary King wrote: How can we get access to secure PDF documents that are just images of pages, or programs that have controls with graphical text labels, or perhaps even the actual titles on DVDs? I guess these frustrations are responsible for a wish that I've heard from time to time on various lists that OCR could be incorporated into a screen reader. I always thought this was just wishful thinking until I heard the June 23, 2009, edition of Innovations. You can hear the program by going to The Global Voice at www.theglobalvoice.info and visiting the Program Gallery. The last interview on this edition of Innovations was with a representative from Baum, a company in Germany which manufactures the Cobra screen reader. I found the most interesting feature of Cobra to be it's onscreen OCR capability. Pressing a key combination will take a screenshot of graphical text and pass it along to a dedicated version of the FineReader OCR engine, where text recognition takes place. You can then read one of those secure PDF documents with images of text or interact with a program whose controls with graphical text have now been identified. Nothing was mentioned about titles on DVD menus, but if they are displayed in a font that FineReader can recognize, then you should be able to access them as well. If onscreen OCR works well in practice, the question now is: Which screen reader company, GW Micro or Freedom Scientific, will be next to offer their users this new innovation in screen reading technology? Gary King mailto:[email protected] If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message.
