Hi Gordon, Maybe Sandy Tomkins would like to comment on TextGrabber, but I can add a few words since I picked this app up when it was briefly on sale for $0.99 about a week ago. TextGrabber is accessible with the iPhone, and uses the ABBYY Fine Reader OCR engine, so it should be able to recognize text in more than 60 languages. I did get usable results from this when trying it on the fly, but not with the same accuracy as with Prizmo (which usually lists for $9.99 except for a period of a little over a week at the beginning of June, when Creaceed put all their apps on sale for 70% off for their third anniversary and the price dropped to $2.99; this was announced on this list). I think the main reason for the better results with Prizmo comes from its feature where you can take pictures with Voice Control by saying "Take Picture". This minimizes blurring that occurs when you have to double- or split-tap a camera button to take a picture for OCR. I tried this on an iPhone 4.
When you launch TextGrabber, you're immediately in the mode where the camera is switched on. Doing a two finger flick "Read all" will tell you that you're in the Viewfinder, and VoiceOver will announce "ABBY TextGrabber" (label at top of screen), "Info" button (beside the label; will tell you the program version), "EN" (language setting for OCR; abbreviation for "English" which is the default language), "FR" (abbreviation for "French" -- I turned this on in "Settings"; all checked OCR languages are identified with two letter codes in the lower left corner of the screen), "Shoot" button (immediately above the "Home" button at the bottom center of the screen; use this to take picture), "Settings" button (lower right corner of the screen), "History" button (bottom left corner of the screen, just below language identification), "Show Photo Album" button (bottom right corner of screen, just below "Settings" button). So basically, apart from the labels at the top of the screen that identify the app, all the controls are at the bottom of the screen. On the left side, you get the announced OCR languages, and the "History" button that lets you access past OCR text results. On the right side, you have the "Settings" button, where you can set up additional recognition languages, specify a "Search engine" (more about this later), and set switches for camera flash, snapshot saving, and crop; below that you have the "Show Photo Album" button that lets you choose an image from your camera roll to OCR instead of taking an image with the "Shoot" button. In practice, the only control I used was the "Settings" button to add OCR languages so I could check other language performance. Picture taking is similar to the technique with Prizmo: (1) optionally check light levels with the $0.99 "Light Detector" app before starting; (2) start with camera lens (upper right corner of iPhone) roughly centered on the page you want to OCR, and aligned with the edges, and slowly raise the iPhone above the page with two hands to keep it flat, stopping at around 9 inches for standard letter pages; (3) after you hear VoiceOver say "auto-focused", split tap on the "Shoot" button. The next screen will be announced as "Crop gripper", and is meant to let you adjust the corners of the image to crop the active area. In practice, the only options are "New Photo" (button in bottom left) and ""Read" (button in bottom right). Just do a four-finger tap on the bottom half of the screen to go to the last element, or else flick to the "Read" button, and dou ble tap. If successful, the OCR can take as little as 10 or 20 seconds, and you get the results text screen, which you can double tap to edit. At the bottom of this results page are buttons for "Send by Email", "Copy to Clipboard", and "Search in Web". I ran four test cases on a passage from a book in French: Prizmo, TextGrabber, then both apps with an image of the page I had taken using a camera app called "ClearCam" that takes a series of pictures in a row, and saves the clearest to the camera roll. Prizmo (with VoiceControl) gave me essentially a perfect result. TextGrabber, even trying to hold the iPhone still and split tap the "Shoot" button, gave some recognizable text, but tended to garble names. When I sent the ClearCam camera roll image to Prizmo and TextGrabber, the TextGrabber result was better, and the Prizmo result was slightly worse. I couldn't really say whether the basic OCR engine of Prizmo or TextGrabber was better in one case or the other. In the instance where I use the ClearCam camera roll image, they made different decisions in some cases. What was very evident is that the VoiceControl feature of Prizmo made it much easier to take a good image without blurring when touching the shutter controls. The "Search in Web" function of TextGrabber sends the text from your OCR to a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo. When I tried this on the text just photographed with the base TextGrabber app, there were too many mistakes to pull up the reference. But when I used the "Search in Web" function on TextGrabber's result from using "Show Photo Album" and selecting the ClearCam image, instead of the result from using the "Shoot" button and taking the image within TextGrabber, the results were good enough to pull up the actual passage on the web. This was the introduction to Marcel Pagnol's book, titled in English, "My Father's Glory". Of course the web reference gave access to the text with no errors. I have sometimes gotten pretty good results with TextGrabber, but I'll routinely get better results with Prizmo. In general, I can improve my results in TextGrabber by using the $1.99 ClearCam app to take the pictures, then selecting the last image in the Camera Roll for OCR in TextGrabber via the "Show Photo Album" button. My guess is that someone starting from scratch would find it difficult to use TextGrabber. With Prizmo, after practice you can improve to the point that you get better results with all the OCR apps, even though you won't start that way. Sandy can probably give more comments based on her extensive tests of OCR apps. HTH. Cheers, Esther On Sep 1, 2011, at 00:29, Gordon Keen wrote: > Hi > > Sans iphone here so anyone want to try it for accessibility? > > http://www.reghardware.com/2011/09/01/app_of_the_week_ios_textgrabber/ > > > If it works with voiceover perhaps someone could report back? > > Regards > > G > > From Bridgerule in glorious Devon, England. <--- 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]/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> The Mac-Access mailing list is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free! 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