Begin forwarded message:
> From: "David Griffith" <[email protected]> > Subject: [BCAB] EyePal on the Mac - First Impressions > This is a post I made to another list. I thought it may be of interest on > this group. For those unfamiliar with the EyePal, it is a camera scanner which sitts on a tripod under which you can place books to be scanned. > Date: 26 August 2011 10:42:48 GMT+01:00 > To: "'BCAB Discussion List'" <[email protected]> > Reply-To: BCAB Discussion List <[email protected]> > > I installed the EyePal on my Mac yesterday and these are the first > impressions. > > Setup is relatively straightforward. I copied the dmg image to my downloads > folder and installed it from there. > > The start-up with voiceover is slightly confusing as the announcement is X11 > is running in the background. > Also pressing the normal apple commands for a menu will bring up an X11 menu > which will not be useful to you. > The key is that after the eyePal software is launched you need to turn > voiceover off. > The EyePal software will then work in self voicing mode. > The software is clearly a port of the windows version to the Mac using the > x11 utility. This means that it has very similar commands to running a > windows program. > Pressing the command button on the Mac keyboard will bring up the menu bar > just like pressing alt on the PC version. > In the menus you can customise the self voicing. The 2 available voices > through eyePal are Jill and tom, which I believe are Scansoft voices. > I changed from the default Jill to tom. Whilst this is not alex it does > approximate to the Mac Alex voice I think but others may disagree. > There are options to turn self voicing off but I am not sure that the menus > would then be accessible with voiceover. > The manual, which I downloaded from the web, is also clearly a port from the > windows manual. Despite the fact it is talking about a Mac application there > are several references to using Jaws which is odd. > On first impression the Mac version of the software is a lot more stable > than the early PC version that I am used to. Hopefully the updated PC > equivalent will be just as stable. > > I tried scanning a letter from listening books and the result was instant > and 100% accurate. > There were no beeps saying it was trying to recognise the page. It was just > instantly available to read. This was a very impressive start. > I then set up a book to scan and scanned several pages of a book by John > rawls. > In book mode the camera scanning seems slightly slower than I found on the > PC using the early software. > However it is still pretty rapid and to most people is still amazingly fast. > A page scans in perhaps 2 seconds rather than the 1 second on the PC. > However this slight slowing in actual scanning is more than offset by the > improvement in the speed of book conversion to text format. > What the eyePal actually does is save pages as images and can instantly OCR > on the fly just reading off these images which is very impressive. However I > prefer to have books in text format to use in a word processor and there is > save book as text function for this. > On the PC side, using the early version of the software , this was > bafflingly time consuming . Given that you could read text off images > immediately it seemed strange that the conversion to text process was so > slow. Also there is a command to save a page to text and this was > instantaneous so it is very strange that the book function was slow. . To be > fair this may well have improved in later versions of the PC software. It > has certainly improved in the Mac version. > > In relation to the OCR performance in book mode the results were mixed. The > results of this were good on the first couple of pages. But deteriorated on > subsequent pages. > From past experience this was almost certainly because I scanned without the > camera light being turned on. > In the windows version of the software you turn the camera light on by > pressing control L. This command did not work in the Mac version. > Humanware rang me this morning to tell me that command L should perform a > similar function with the Mac version of the software. > I will experiment with this and repeat the scanning today. > I'll let you know how I get on. > > > Regards > > David Griffith > > > __________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature > database 6411 (20110826) __________ > > The message was checked by ESET Smart Security. > > http://www.eset.com > > > > -- > To find out more about BCAB and the benefits that membership can bring, > please visit our website: > http://www.bcab.org.uk/ > > To manage your subscription to the BCAB mailing list, please visit our > website: > http://www.bcab.org.uk/bcab-discussion-list/ > > To discuss matters relating to the mailing list, please email > [email protected]. <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] 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/[email protected]/>. 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