Hi,
I completely agree with this and well put as always with example practical
uses cited.
Have you suggested this to Winston?
Robin
-----Original Message-----
From: Sieghard Weitzel
Sent: Tuesday, May 7, 2019 12:23 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Voice Dream Scanner
I think it would also be great if Voice Dream Scanner would announce if a
page is right side up, upside down or sideways as Openbook does. I sometimes
would find it quite useful to know if I am holding the page correctly as a
sighted person would read it, for example, I may want to staple several
pages together. This would be equally as useful a feature in Seeing AI and
it could easily be an optional feature you could turn on or off.
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Cook,
Steve
Sent: Tuesday, May 7, 2019 6:51 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Voice Dream Scanner
The below article is from the May issue of Access World
Voice Dream Scanner: A New Kind of OCR
There is a new player in the optical character recognition (OCR) space, and
it comes from an old friend: Winston Chen, the developer of Voice Dream
Reader and Voice Dream Writer, both of which we’ve reviewed in past issues
of AccessWorld. In this article we’ll start out with a brief conversation
with Chen. Then we’ll take a look at the developer’s latest offering: Voice
Dream Scanner. Spoiler alert—it will probably be the best $5.99 you’ll ever
spend on a text recognition app!
AccessWorld readers who use their phones to audibly read e-Pub books, PDFs
or Bookshare titles are likely already familiar with Voice Dream Reader. It
works so well with VoiceOver and TalkBack, it’s hard to believe it wasn’t
developed specifically for the access market. But according to Chen, “I just
wanted to build a pocket reader I could use to store all my books and files
so I could listen to them on the go. No one was more surprised than me when
I began receiving feedback from dyslexic and blind users describing how
helpful Voice Dream Reader was for their needs and making some simple
suggestions to improve the app’s accessibility.”
Chen’s second offering, Voice Dream Writer, was also directed at the
mainstream market. “Sometimes it’s easier to proofread your document by
listening to it instead of simply rereading the text,” says Chen. At the
time, Apple’s VoiceOver cut and paste features and other block text
manipulation capabilities were,shall we say, not quite what they are today?
The innovative way Chen handled these functions made Voice Dream Writer
equally useful to users with visual impairments.
Reinventing the OCR Engine
“I’ve been wanting to add OCR to Voice Dream Reader for a few years now,”
says Chen. “It would be useful for reading protected PDF’s and handouts and
memos from school and work.”
The hurdle Chen kept encountering was finding a useable OCR engine. “There
are some free, open source engines, but they don’t work well enough for my
purposes,” he says. “The ones that do work well are quite expensive, either
as a one-time license purchase with each app sold or with ongoing
pay-by-the-use options. Either of these would have raised the price I have
to charge too much for my value proposition.”
Last year, however, Chen began experimenting with Apple’s artificial
intelligence (AI), called Vision Framework, that’s built into the latest iOS
versions, along with Google’s Tesseract, TensorFlow Lite, and ML Kit.
“Instead of using a single standard OCR engine, I combined the best aspects
of each of these freely available tools, and I was pleasantly surprised by
the results.”
Instead of making OCR a Voice Dream Reader feature, Chen decided to
incorporate his discovery into a separate app called Voice Dream Scanner. “I
considered turning it into an in-app purchase, only there are a lot of
schools that use Reader and they aren’t allowed to make in-app purchases,”
he says. As to why he didn’t simply make it a new Reader feature, he smiles,
“I do have a family to feed.”
Chen has been careful to integrate the new Voice Dream Scanner functionality
into VD Reader, however. For example, if you load a protected PDF file into
the app and open it, the Documents tab now offers a recognition feature. You
can now also add to your Voice Dream Reader Library not only from Dropbox,
Google Drive, and other sources, including Bookshare, but using your device’s
camera as well.
To take advantage of this integration you’ll need both Voice Dream Reader
and Voice Dream Scanner. Both can be purchased from the iOS App Store. VD
Reader is also available for Android, but currently VD Scanner is iOS only.
Of course you don’t have to have VD Reader to enjoy the benefits of the new
Voice Dream Scanner.
A Voice Dream Scanner Snapshot
The app installs quickly and easily, and displays with the icon name
“Scanner” on your iOS device. Aim the camera toward a page of text. The app
displays a real-time video image preview which is also the “Capture Image”
button. Double tap this button, the camera clicks, and the image is
converted to text almost immediately. You are placed on the “Play” button,
give a quick double tap and the text is spoken using either a purchased VD
Reader voice or your chosen iOS voice. Note: You can instruct Scanner to
speak recognized text automatically in the Settings Menu.
From the very first beta version of this app I tested, I was amazed by the
speed and accuracy of the recognition. The app is amazingly forgiving as far
as camera position and lighting. Envelopes read the return addresses,
postmarks and addresses. Entire pages of text voiced without a single
mistake. Scanner even did an excellent job with a bag of potato chips, even
after it was crumpled and uncrumpled several times. Despite the fact there
is no OCR engine to download, and the recognition is done locally, a network
connection is not required. I used the app with equal success even with
Airplane mode turned on.
After each scan you are offered the choice to swipe left once to reach the
Discard button, twice to reach the Save button. Note: the VoiceOver
two-finger scrub gesture also deletes the current text.
Scanner does not save your work automatically. You have the choice to save
it as a text file, a PDF, or to send it directly to Voice Dream Reader. You
probably wouldn’t send a single page to Reader, but the app comes with a
batch mode. Use this mode to scan several pages at once and then save them
together: perfect for that 10-page print report your boss dropped on your
desk, or maybe the short story a creative writing classmate passed out for
review.
Other Scanner features of interest to those with visual impairments are edge
detection and a beta version of auto capture.
Edge detection plays a tone that grows increasingly steady until all four
edges are visible, at which time it becomes a solid tone. Auto-capture does
just that, but since the AI currently detects any number of squares where
there is no text this feature is only available in beta. However, if you're
using a scanner stand it will move along quite nicely, nearly as fast as you
can rearrange the pages.
You can also import an image to be recognized. Unfortunately, as of now,
this feature is limited to pictures in your photo library. There is
currently no way to send an e-mail or file image to Scanner. Look for this
to change in an upcoming version.
The benefits of Voice Dream Scanner are by no means limited to the blindness
community. Chen developed the app to be used as a pocket player for
documents and other printed material he wishes to scan and keep. Low vision
users can do the same, then use either iOS magnification or another
text-magnification app to review documents. It doesn’t matter in which
direction the material is scanned. Even upside-down documents are saved
right-side up. Performance is improved by the “Image Enhancement” feature,
which attempts to locate the edges of scanned documents and save them more
or less as pages.
The Bottom Line
I never thought I’d see the day when I would move KNFB-Reader off my iPhone’s
Home screen. Microsoft’s Seeing AI gave it a good run for its money and
until now I kept them both on my Home screen. But I have now moved
KNFB-Reader to a back screen and given that honored spot to Voice Dream
Scanner.
Most of my phone scanning is done when I sort through the mail. Seeing AI’s
“Short Text” feature does a decent job helping me sort out which envelopes
to keep and which to toss into my hardware recycle bin. But Scanner is just
as accurate as any OCR-engine based app, and so quick, the confirmation
announcement of the Play button often voices after the scanned document has
begun to read.
This is the initial release. Chen himself says there is still work to be
done. “Column recognition is not yet what I hope it will be,” he says. “I’d
also like to improve auto-capture and maybe offer users the choice to use
the volume buttons to initiate a scan.
Stay tuned.
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