Hi list, I recently bought the Fujitsu ScanSnap IX500 document scanner. It’s a great scanner, but it doesn’t support any standard scanning protocols so must be used with its proprietary software, ScanSnap Manager, which is the scanner driver. I’ll address the accessibility of ScanSnap Manager a little further on. But first, a word on setup of the ScanSnap.
The ScanSnap was fairly easy to setup. I tried using Prizmo and Talking goggles to read the instructions that came with the ScanSnap, but ultimately downloaded KNFB Reader and had much better success with it. Physical setup of the ScanSnap was fairly straight forward. The ScanSnap folds up into a very compact unit, and setting it up largely involves unfolding it, which is fairly easy. There are a bunch of protective stuff taped to various parts of the scanner which need to be removed. One of these was inside the guts of the scanner, and I needed sighted help to figure out how to do that, though others will likely be able to figure this out themselves. I also needed help finding what Fujitsu refer to as the “side guides”, which are the rails in between which you feed your paper to be scanned. The scanner comes with two DVDs. One is Adobe Acrobat X, which I believe is only for Windows. The other is the ScanSnap Manager software including its custom version of ABBYY FineReader. Talking Goggles on my iPhone was able to identify these for me. The instructions state to instal the ScanSnap software before connecting and turning on the ScanSnap. Once you instal the software, a setup application will guide you through connecting the ScanSnap. This application is completely accessible with VoiceOver and easy to follow and use, with a couple of exceptions. The exceptions are only that at a couple of points it asks you to check that lights on the ScanSnap are flashing particular colours to indicate things are working properly. I got sighted help to confirm this for me, but you’d probably be safe just assuming the lights are showing the right colours. The wifi switch is the one switch on the back of the ScanSnap. When you buy it, it should be in the off position. So to turn it on just flick it. ScanSnap Manager The ScanSnap Manager has room for improvement, but is mostly usable. By default, when you press the scan button, which is the large button on the front of the ScanSnap, and there is only one button on the front of the ScanSnap, it scans your document and then displays a dialog on your Mac which it calls the quick menu. All the buttons in the quick menu are unlabelled and do not have help tags, so it’s largely useless, though I’m sure these could be labeled with sighted assistance. This default behaviour can be changed, however. This is done through the settings dialog available in the ScanSnap Manager application menu, or by pressing command-s. This allows you to choose the default action to be taken once a document is scanned. First you need to uncheck the launch quick menu option, and then you can choose a default action. Options include things like convert to a word doc with AABBYY FineReader, send by email, add to Dropbox, or, my choice, save to folder. This saves to the Pictures folder by default. It also gives you some additional options to configure, and I choose to have ABBYY FineReader automatically perform OCR on the PDF and open it in Preview. So I put my paper in the ScanSnap, press scan, and a few seconds or minutes later, depending on the number of pages, the PDF opens in Preview and can be red by VoiceOver. A note on ABBYY FineReader. The version of ABBYY FineReader which comes with the ScanSnap is a custom version, which can only open documents created by ScanSnap. It will not open other PDFs. On the plus side though, it does a great job, includes a large number of recognition languages, and has good AppleScript support. Apart from a few unlabelled buttons, the main problem with ScanSnap Manager for Mac is that the Profiles page, which allows you to configure profiles, is completely inaccessible. The only interface element visible to VoiceOver is the close button. This page is where you configure where scanned documents are saved, at what resolution documents are scanned, etcetera. So it’s a pretty big drawback. The good thing is that the default settings work really well. The ScanSnap seems to automatically detect page orientation as well as whether pages are double or single sided. So however I shove documents into the scanner the scanned images come out ride side up, with all pages scanned and no blank pages. The OCR quality has been generally very high, though ABBYY FineReader has warned me that I should increase the resolution. Also, in the settings dialog,, you can customise which applications open the scanned files. So you could, for instance, choose to have DocuScan or Prizmo automatically open scanned images after you press the scan button, but I find that ABBYY FineReader is the best option for me at the moment. Scanning to iPhone The ScanSnap IX500 is wifi enabled and can scan directly to your iOS device. It does this through the ScanSnap Connect app available in the App Store. You first need to configure the app to work with your ScanSnap. It’s pretty easy. You just need to ensure your ScanSnap is on and connected to wifi, then launch the ScanSnap Connect app on your iOS device. Choose your scanner from the list of available scanners and enter your ScanSnap’s password. By default, the password is the last four digits of the cereal number. The ScanSnap software will step you through all this, including giving you the password, when you first instal the software. The ScanSnap Connect app for iOS is perfectly accessible. It is dead easy to scan documents with the app. Of course, the app doesn’t perform OCR on the scanned documents, so VoiceOver cannot read their contents initially. But in iOS 8 it’s easy enough to tap the document, tap the share button and then choose an OCR app such as Prizmo to do the OCR for you. I’ve only had the ScanSnap for two days, and plan to try and work out some useful workflows using AppleScript, Hazel and/or whatever I can to make the process of scanning and reading documents as smooth as possible. If and when I have something good worked out I’ll report back. but in the meantime feel free to ask any questions if any of you are in the market for a scanner. Best, Nic -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
