[gui-talk] Fw: The $80 personal reader

[Beth Wright]

Thought this sounded interesting.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Greg Kearney" <gkearney at gmail.com>
M
Subject: The $80 personal reader


>I have made what  may be an important discovery. I call it the $80  
> personal reader. Here is the tail.
> 
> I have book looking into the Kurzweil 3000 Professional reading  
> software for Macintosh to see if it could be used by the blind with  
> VoiceOver to provide similar functionality on the mac that Kurweil  
> 1000 does on the PC. The answer to that question appears to be yes,  
> by the way.
> 
> In the process of doing this testing I got a Canon CanoScan LiDE 60  
> flatbed scanner it cost less than $80. This scanner is powered by the  
> USB cable which is real nice.This scanner has four buttons on the  
> front that can be programmed. They come pre-configured with a program  
> called CanoScan Toolbox X. This program is not very VoiceOver  
> friendly but once you have it installed you don't really need to  
> worry about it much.
> 
> One of the buttons on the scanner, third in for the left, makes PDF  
> files and stores them in your Pictures directory under directories  
> named by date. There is an option in CanoScan Toolbox X to have an  
> external program open the PDF files after scanning I set this to  
> Preview. Now comes the fun part. The default settings for these PDF  
> files it to make them "searchable" which means that the software runs  
> an OCR process on each page. The results of this is a PDF file you  
> can READ WITH VOICEOVER.
> 
> Now there are a few minor matters. You must place the page into the  
> scanner with the top of the page at the front of the scanner. The OCR  
> doesn't seem to work with and upside down or sideways page. CanoScan  
> Toolbox X is just barely VoiceOver compatible. In particular while it  
> seems to let your review a dialog which would let you scan several  
> pages to a single PDF  CanoScan Toolbox X will not let you click the  
> "Next" or "Finish" buttons with the usual VoiceOver keys space bar.  
> However it will place the VoiiceOver cursor on the Next and Finished  
> buttons. You can then use the control-option-command F5 command to  
> move the arrow cursor to the VoiceOvver cursor and then shift-control- 
> option spacebar to click the mouse button on the button you want. The  
> default is finished so if you are reading only a single page just  
> pressing return will do.
> 
> Then, provided you have preview set up as the external application in  
> CanoScan Toolbox X, Preview will open and you can read the scanned  
> pages normally with Voice Over. It works with multi-column text such  
> as magazines and it stores a picture perfect version of what was  
> scanned something Kurzeil 1000 for Windows can not do and which is  
> very important to dyslexics like me who want to see the pictures as  
> well as hear the text. Pictures seem to give it no trouble at all.  
> Further once you have these PDF files you can move them to any other  
> Mac to read or even read them on a PC with Jaws or WindowEyes.
> 
> Mary Beth: If we could get with Canon and get a VoiceOver version of  
> this software put together Apple would have a very powerful tool  
> indeed. This solution is already nearly 80% of software that cost  
> thousands of dollars. If it could do page rotation it would be very  
> useful. I can't stress this enough this is a major find in my mind.  
> An $80 personal reader attached to a computer which has a built in  
> screen reader! At lang las the blind and dyslexics would have tool  
> they need at a reasonable price. I would urge Apple in the strongest  
> way possible to contact Canon to have the minor changes made to make  
> this fully functional.
> 
> Greg Kearney
> 
> 
> 
>