RE: OCR with iOS devices with the VueScan app and wireless scanner
Ester, Fantastic post as usual. I happen to have the same printer you have that I purchased for $39 last black Friday. I also have a Laser printer but I wanted an AirPrint enabled one and the price was right. As you mentioned, my wife who is sighted had to set it up because there was no way that I could find to do it myself. After the setup however, I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised on how well it works wirelessly. I didn't finish reading your message entirely due to my excitement and installed the free version and did a scan and found out in a hurry that I needed higher resolution for OCR. That's what I get for not reading your message to the end. (lol) I do have Prysmo so I'll have to decide whether or not I'd use this app enough to warrant a $5 purchase as I usually just scan whatever I need on my desktop. Thanks again for the most informative message. Best, Rick -Original Message- From: viphone@googlegroups.com [mailto:viphone@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Esther Sent: Monday, July 09, 2012 7:36 PM To: 9577AAC0-42E6-47A8-BF18-EC3BEC9823B7:ABMailRecent; macvisionar...@googlegroups.com Subject: OCR with iOS devices with the VueScan app and wireless scanner Hi All, I use the Prizmo app with my iPhone 4's camera to OCR text. However, recently I've been using a wireless scanner on my network that I control with an iOS app named VueScan Mobile to send scans to the camera roll on my iPhone or iPad, and then using OCR apps like Prizmo or TextGrabber that can import images from the camera roll to OCR. This works pretty nicely when I'm at my home network and want to get an OCR of a simple text document without going go my computer. Now the gotcha is that the all-in-one printer/scanner/copier that I'm using for this is the HP Photosmart D110a, which is one of the first iOS AirPrint enabled printers. And I have to say that I think this is a terrible printer to set up from the point of view of accessibility, since it uses a touch screen with no tactile features or audio feedback to select options and input the IP address information. On the other hand, once it is set up (which you cannot do without sighted assistance), you can work with this wirelessly as well as through a USB connection. I'm using this printer because it was free with a MacBook Air purchase that was made last year. I think that Apple has discontinued the free or $99 reimbursement printer program since then. If you want to check whether this app will work with your wireless printer, you can check the listed supported printers at the developer's VueScan Mobile web page at: http://www.hamrick.com/mob.html Alternatively, you can download the free version of the VueScan Mobile app, which does not have support for the high resolution option that is needed for OCR, but which will otherwise work. In any case, this HP D110a printer, along with a number of other HP, Canon, and Epson wireless printers, is automatically detected when you start up the VueScan Mobile iOS app. There's a very simple VueScan Mobile screen with an Options button and a Scan button at the bottom of the page. The Options button lets you select the scanner (in case there is more than one on your network), choose the resolution (which you want to be high for OCR), select the scan mode (text for OCR, but also settings for black and white or color photo), and an append switch button that can be set to on for multipage documents. So to access the setup options, I would do a four finger tap on the bottom half of the screen to go to the last element -- the Scan button -- and flick left to the Options button and double tap. (These two buttons are just above the Home button, but you have to move up and to the left to get to the Options button, or up and to the right from the Home button to get to the Scan button directly by touch.) There is one unlabeled button in the top right corner of the VueScan Mobile screen, which is an info button to access the About screen with the version number and an option to Email Problem Report. I use the two finger double tap and hold to label this as Info. After the triple tone a Label Element window should appear that lets you type in your custom label in the text field. Flick right the Save button and double tap to save your label. Once you have set up your options, double tap the Scan button. It takes maybe 20 seconds for the scan to complete. You won't hear anything announced until the scan is finished, when you'll hear 1 of 1. However, if you do a two-finger flick up read all, you'll get an announcement in progress at the end. I just wait now until I hear the 1 of 1. The page with the scanned results has a Save button in the top right, which has options for Camera Roll, Send Email., Print, and Other. To OCR the page, you want to choose Camera Roll, so you can open the jpeg image in an OCR app that lets you select inputs from your camera roll images. The other options will send an email with
Re: OCR with iOS devices with the VueScan app and wireless scanner
Because Esther recommended the app I gave it a try with a HP LaserJet CM2320 and it worked really well. The only thing that did not seem to work is the document feeder, but I only tried once, so there may be something more I need to do. Either way for $5 it is a handy piece of software to have. On Jul 10, 2012, at 12:00 PM, Rick Alfaro wrote: Ester, Fantastic post as usual. I happen to have the same printer you have that I purchased for $39 last black Friday. I also have a Laser printer but I wanted an AirPrint enabled one and the price was right. As you mentioned, my wife who is sighted had to set it up because there was no way that I could find to do it myself. After the setup however, I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised on how well it works wirelessly. I didn't finish reading your message entirely due to my excitement and installed the free version and did a scan and found out in a hurry that I needed higher resolution for OCR. That's what I get for not reading your message to the end. (lol) I do have Prysmo so I'll have to decide whether or not I'd use this app enough to warrant a $5 purchase as I usually just scan whatever I need on my desktop. Thanks again for the most informative message. Best, Rick -Original Message- From: viphone@googlegroups.com [mailto:viphone@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Esther Sent: Monday, July 09, 2012 7:36 PM To: 9577AAC0-42E6-47A8-BF18-EC3BEC9823B7:ABMailRecent; macvisionar...@googlegroups.com Subject: OCR with iOS devices with the VueScan app and wireless scanner Hi All, I use the Prizmo app with my iPhone 4's camera to OCR text. However, recently I've been using a wireless scanner on my network that I control with an iOS app named VueScan Mobile to send scans to the camera roll on my iPhone or iPad, and then using OCR apps like Prizmo or TextGrabber that can import images from the camera roll to OCR. This works pretty nicely when I'm at my home network and want to get an OCR of a simple text document without going go my computer. Now the gotcha is that the all-in-one printer/scanner/copier that I'm using for this is the HP Photosmart D110a, which is one of the first iOS AirPrint enabled printers. And I have to say that I think this is a terrible printer to set up from the point of view of accessibility, since it uses a touch screen with no tactile features or audio feedback to select options and input the IP address information. On the other hand, once it is set up (which you cannot do without sighted assistance), you can work with this wirelessly as well as through a USB connection. I'm using this printer because it was free with a MacBook Air purchase that was made last year. I think that Apple has discontinued the free or $99 reimbursement printer program since then. If you want to check whether this app will work with your wireless printer, you can check the listed supported printers at the developer's VueScan Mobile web page at: http://www.hamrick.com/mob.html Alternatively, you can download the free version of the VueScan Mobile app, which does not have support for the high resolution option that is needed for OCR, but which will otherwise work. In any case, this HP D110a printer, along with a number of other HP, Canon, and Epson wireless printers, is automatically detected when you start up the VueScan Mobile iOS app. There's a very simple VueScan Mobile screen with an Options button and a Scan button at the bottom of the page. The Options button lets you select the scanner (in case there is more than one on your network), choose the resolution (which you want to be high for OCR), select the scan mode (text for OCR, but also settings for black and white or color photo), and an append switch button that can be set to on for multipage documents. So to access the setup options, I would do a four finger tap on the bottom half of the screen to go to the last element -- the Scan button -- and flick left to the Options button and double tap. (These two buttons are just above the Home button, but you have to move up and to the left to get to the Options button, or up and to the right from the Home button to get to the Scan button directly by touch.) There is one unlabeled button in the top right corner of the VueScan Mobile screen, which is an info button to access the About screen with the version number and an option to Email Problem Report. I use the two finger double tap and hold to label this as Info. After the triple tone a Label Element window should appear that lets you type in your custom label in the text field. Flick right the Save button and double tap to save your label. Once you have set up your options, double tap the Scan button. It takes maybe 20 seconds for the scan to complete. You won't hear anything announced until the scan is finished, when you'll hear 1 of 1. However, if you do a two-finger
