Hello Marcia,
Text Extractor is not an accessible app, and has a slew of unlabeled buttons,
but I was able to get it to work with VoiceOver after some painful
experimentation. This app fails on a lot of inputs that ABBYY FineReader would
handle without problems. It's also very slow to do the OCR, and one of the
difficulty in trying to use it is that you can't tell what is happening while
it is working. The only way I was first able to tell that it was still working
(and this was processing a single page input PDF that was a scan sent to me as
a mail attachment) was by checking the "File" menu on the menu bar and seeing
that the "Cancel Extraction" option was still active while the
"StartExtraction" option stayed dimmed. I later found the progress bar at the
end of the window. The main reasons I was willing to take a look at this app
were that: (1) It was discounted to $1.99 (from $12.99) for "Two-Dollar
Tuesday", and 2) a check of reviews described this app as having decent
accuracy (meaning better than 90%, which is not great by OCR standards) for a
relatively low price, despite being slow to run. This does not take into
account that the interface is not accessible (which you couldn't tell from the
reviews).
Since you may have bought this already, judging from your posted query, I'll
tell you how I managed to use this. The results were not bad for the case I
was finally able to succeed with. But frankly, for anyone who has an iPhone,
iPod Touch, or iPad, my advice would be to buy Prizmo for iOS (which just went
on sale for $4.99), and use that instead. Not only did it OCR the same mail
attached PDF file about 20 times faster, but it only took a few key presses on
my iPhone, the whole process was accessible with VoiceOver, and I suspect that
the accuracy rate is higher (if I were willing to spend more time testing the
Text Extractor app). The extra $3 for the improved speed, accuracy and
accessibility of Prizmo on iOS is worth it. The only advantage, in terms of
your initial objective, is that Text Extractor is running on the Mac, and the
fact that it's currently $1.99.
OK, here's how I was able to use Text Extractor on the Mac. When you open the
window, it has a slew of unlabeled buttons. Some of them are for dealing with
the input image and rotating it. (This reminds me that Prizmo will also work
even if the image is upside down or rotated by 90 degrees -- you down't even
have to adjust this!).
1. The first unlabeled button is for "Open File". You could also use Command-O
to bring up the same dialog window to select a file, or you could select the
file from the "File" menu on the menu bar, which is the first way I tried this.
2. The next controls will be dimmed until you select a file. This is a
checkbox for turning on OCR. VoiceOver will say "OCR: Off", then "dimmed
unchecked checkbox", then "On". If you have opened a file, the checkbox will
not be dimmed. VO-space to check this so that OCR is turned on.
3. The next pop up button is for the OCR language. I left this on "English"
but other options are Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese,
Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.
4. The next pop up button is for "All Pages" or "Current Page". I left this on
"All Pages".
5. The next unlabeled button is for "Extract". The "File" menu has shortcut
options for starting and canceling the extraction (Command-Option-S and
Command-Option-C). In practice, it's easier to navigate the GUI and use the
buttons (once you label them). If you use the default shortcuts for opening a
file (Command-O) and starting an extraction (Command-Option-S), the OCR
function won't be turned on. There's no preference file where you can set this
up as a default.
6. The next sets of unlabeled buttons deal with the input image window. The
first two must be "Previous" and "Next", because the selected page number of
the text changes ("1 of 2" or "2 of 2") when these are pressed. Then there are
a whole bunch of other unlabeled buttons (8 in total) that do things like
rotating images and other things that I can't check.
7. The last of the unlabeled buttons is the "Save as" button that only works
when the extraction is finished. This lets you specify the name and location
of the OCR'ed text. After this button there is "Text", where the image input
file appears, and then a vertical splitter, and an "Edit Text" window that is
blank until the extraction is finished. Once the extraction finishes, you can
navigate to this window and read the result. VO-Left back to the unlabeled
button to press it (VO-space) and save contents to a text file.
8. At the end of the "Edit Text" window, once extraction starts, is a progress
indicator.
I think this is a complete description of the Text Extractor GUI. In the "Help"
menu on the menu bar there is a "Technical Support" option that takes you to
the web page. A lot of the description uses embedded images.
Hope this helps. For anyone else who is interested, here's the link to the app
in the Mac App Store:
• Text Extractor - Extract text from PDF & Image with OCR (on sale for $1.99,
reduced from $12.99) by Gerald Ni
https://itunes.apple.com/app/text-extractor-extract-text/id693899907?mt=12
It does work, but I found it painful to use. It also failed on a lot of files
that ABBYY FineReader Express would handle. I really think Prizmo on an iOS
device works better, faster, more accurately, and far, more accessibly if you
are willing to spend $3 more.
Here's the link to Prizmo:
• Prizmo - Scanning, OCR, and Speech ($4.99 on sale for Thanksgiving, list
price $9.99) by Creaceed
https://itunes.apple.com/app/prizmo/id366791896?mt=8
I should add that I'm running iOS 6.0.4 on my iPhone, and the latest version of
Prizmo is for iOS 7, but I'm not aware of any problems that surfaced with the
current version.
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
On Nov 27, 2013, at 1:06 PM, Marcia Yale wrote:
> This OCR app for the Mac was and may still be on sale. Does anyone have any
> experience with it using VoiceOver? I would like an inexpensive OCR app for
> my Mac and hope this one is accessible.
>
>
> Marcia Yale
> "Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can
> hear her breathing."--Arundhati Roy
>
>
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