Nancy, thanks for looping me in on this discussion. Wendy, it’s a pleasure, albeit virtually.
TLDR: this is possible, but may not be a good idea. Regarding the scanning of text, there are several apps, mainly on IOS, that can achieve this. they range from use cases such as scanning a piece of paper to scanning printed text on a wall or a sign. There are also magnification apps along the same lines that will simply provide some level of magnification. Some of these do naïve magnification, but I believe I can also find some examples of those that are smart e.g. perform antialiasing and other mathematical transformations to the image to enhance the reading of text. The problem here is one of acquisition. If I’m blind, which I happen to be, then I don’t know where the text I want to read is. even if I know the general vicinity of the text, or can infer it, (after all, if I feel a sign or wooden tablet, it probably has text on it), it’s still not a straight forward task to point a camera at it. first off, cameras tend to be on the left most or right most of a device, and the natural inclination, especially of low vision/blind users is to point the center of the back of the device at the thing they wish to take an image of. Next is the lack of preview. So, for example, I won’t know if the text I want to read is fully in frame or if I should change orientation and so forth. For example, do I need to lift up 6 inches, 9 inches, etc.? There are ways of mitigating all of the above, so I don’t wish to portray a completely hopeless situation. there are some apps that give some sound feedback during alignment, others that are simply good at being orientation and size invariant, and still others that let you take multiple pictures and stich them together to help construct the whole document. But, the end result is that these are usually justified when wanting to read an important piece of mail, or perhaps answer the most valuable of queries (is this the bottle of my most favorite beer or my second most favorite beer), etc. Side note, the beer question is most often answered with a bar code scanning app, and/or simply having both and taking a stochastic approach to drink pairing. I realize this may be getting lengthy, but to recap so far, from an on-device point of view, there are both magnification and scanning apps with the intent for consumption of external text in the environment by a vision-impaired user, however, now to the second part of my answer. I’m not sure that this is a good idea. There’s a lot of room for error in this situation as discussed above. Also, there’s a high barrier to using this approach for the user. Folks must have the apps, or they can be provided, and then the use of them is somewhat complex. It’s not hard by any stretch, but it’s also not as easy as “1 2 3” especially with retakes and such. Additionally there is an incredibly high variance both in the intrauser experience and in the interuser experience, and this may not be desired, though I am admittedly totally unfamiliar with your specifics requirements, wishes, and desires for the user of course As I wrap this up, it occurs to me that you may also have been asking about an offline approach to this problem, and if you were, I apologize for the above, and would say that if you wish to automate the scanning of textual information for rendering into speech and enlarged forms, there are some great solutions. The first is the use of a document scanner, as these have excellent properties for text scanning (assuming whatever you’re scanning is amenable to be ran through a document scanner), and then the use of reasonable state of the art OCR really does result in a 95% usable situation. the remaining 5% is human effort, but can be achieved relatively quickly after some basic training. As for rendering into voice (technologies such as text to speech can be used) and for enlargement (there’s also a myriad of approaches here depending on consumption e.g. paper Vs. screen). I hope this helps, and please feel free to ask away if I was unclear. Cheers Take care, Sina President, Prime Access Consulting, Inc. Twitter: @SinaBahram Company Website: http://www.pac.bz Personal Website: http://www.sinabahram.com Blog: http://blog.sinabahram.com From: Nancy Proctor [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2015 10:53 AM To: [email protected] Cc: Sina Bahram <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Label text scan to audio Hi Wendy, You might ask Sina Bahram about his work in this area: Sina Bahram <[email protected]> He has been collaborating with a lot of museums on accessibility solutions, including the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as on the digita11y.org access app project. I look forward to hearing what you find out! Nancy -- Nancy Proctor, PhD Deputy Director for Digital Experience and Communications, BMA [email protected] o: +1 (443) 573-1596 m: +1 (301) 642-6257 @NancyProctor Baltimore Museum of Art 10 Art Museum Drive Baltimore, MD 21218 +1 (443) 573-1700 http://artBMA.org @artBMA Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 14:46:26 +0000 From: Wendy Sporleder <[email protected]> To: 'Museum Computer Network Listserv' <[email protected]> Subject: [MCN-L] Label text scan to audio Message-ID: <blupr04mb006e2073838a37c622cfa4e96...@blupr04mb006.namprd04.prod.outlook .com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To assist visually impaired visitors, is anyone having success with text scan to audio/large font text using an app or similar? Wendy Sporleder Database Administrator Saint Louis Art Museum One Fine Arts Drive, Forest Park Saint Louis, MO. 63110 314.655.5318 [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>, _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: [email protected] To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://mcn.edu/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l The MCN-L archives can be found at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
