Hi Will, I don't have an iPhone 4s, but I can say that using ZoomReader's OCR on an iPhone 4 with only VoiceOver and no vision gives substantially poorer results than with Prizmo, TextGrabber, or SayText. I got the ZoomReader app when they announced a one-day half price sale of the app for $9.99 near the end of July, ZoomReader uses the same ABBYY Finereader engine for OCR as does the TextGrabber app by ABBYY, and I was interested in how it would do, since this works in over 60 languages (just according to the description of ABBYY's own TextGrabber app).
This was under iOS 4, and to be fair, ZoomReader is not designed primarily for OCR by users who are blind. The app also emphasizes other features that are specifically valuable to low vision readers, such as letting you magnify text and adjust the color scheme so that reading images captured of the text is easier. The main problem I had with ZoomReader is that there's no way around the image blurring you get due to shaking the camera when you take a picture when double or split tapping the button to take a picture. That should change with the new iOS 5 ability to take pictures by pressing the Volume Up button at the side of the iPhone. However, for a blind user, that would also be an improvement in ABBYY's TextGrabber OCR app, which is 6-7 times cheaper than ZoomReader's $19.99 list price. (I got TextGrabber when it was on sale for $0.99, but the normal list price is $2.99.) The other thing that Prizmo and SayText do that helps blind users is that they are better at dealing with slightly skewed text than most OCR apps. SayText does this by checking the edges of the pages, and assuming that your text is aligned with the page boundaries. Prizmo in its 1.1 version just uses a software processing scheme that is more tolerant of slightly skewed lines -- it was noticeably better when I tried this in the update that came out a few months after the initial release. I know that Mike Arrigo has mentioned there could be more advances in Camera apps and OCR use if Apple opened up the list of what developers can access. That's true, and looking ahead, we can expect to use the gyroscope and other built-in hardware to tell us when the camera is held level, etc. However, there are still some advantages to the walled garden approach of Apple control. I read about Apple's filing patents for some of these camera features sometime back, and the trick of using the Volume Up button to take a picture with less camera shake is one that the Camera+ app implemented a year ago, explicitly going around the Apple approval process by sending you to an external web site to activate the feature. I tried the Camera+ app then, because I was interested in whether this would work better for VoiceOver users. Well, a side-effect of having that feature present is that VoiceOver volume immediately dropped and stayed dropped for all other applications on the iPhon e, effectively becoming unusable. Just to let you know there are good reasons for some of these guidelines. Prizmo still rules, but if you have become proficient in using your camera and OCR with Prizmo, you can probably use TextGrabber effectively, as well. The difficulty is in becoming proficient in using OCR without first using Prizmo. HTH. Cheers, Esther On Oct 16, 2011, at 11:07, william lomas wrote: > hi has anyone gotten zoom reader then to OCR on the 4s? > how good is it now for someone with no sight? > > <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to mac-access@mac-access.net You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/maillist.xml> The Mac-Access mailing list is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free! Please remember to update your membership options periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/>
