Esther, I thought the comment about most Voiceover users picking up their phone in landscape mode interesting. I actually have always used mine in portrait mode. I wonder though if the page has to be oriented correctly, I assume (and this probably is a pretty silly question) Text Detective already assumes the camera is oriented in the lower right corner, thus being 90 degrees off from what may be considered correct orientation? In other words could people have less than stellar results if the phone were oriented in the portrait mode? I don't know if the instructions tell you to put the phone in landscape mode, but would assume it does. I find this pretty interesting actually. I do agree the simplicity of Text Detective does make it attractive, but even as a 1.0 app I would have thought maybe the dev would have accounted for some features such as using the flash or auto flash and orientation of the document. I will be watching this app closely to see what comes next. Interestingly, this app was mentioned in a message that went out to the Section 508 working group in the agency where I work. The Section 508 working group is an interesting name since the objective of the group is to deal with accessibility of all IT and other technologies used in the workplace, although we tend to stray into other areas. :) Thanks for sharing the information.
Scott On Jul 21, 2012, at 5:09 PM, Esther <mori...@mac.com> wrote: > Hi Anne and Others, > > No, Text Detective does not yet support languages other than English. What > that means for languages like French, which use a Latin alphabet, is that > you'll get many of the words, but characters where you have an "e" with an > acute accent will show up as the number "6", for example. > > The plus side is that it is simple to use, and it gives people some better > immediate results because it has them hold the phone in landscape mode, which > is the way most VoiceOver users will pick up their iPhones, and is easier to > keep documents in alignment. However, because you're holding the phone this > way, and the document has to be in portrait mode, you don't get the full page > -- only a section of it. There's no setting to turn flash on, again in the > interests of keeping things simple. Unlike Prizmo, TextGrabber, and Perfect > OCR, you need to orient the page correctly to get results. The program won't > work if the document is upside down or rotated 90 degrees as it will for > these other programs. > > The design philosophy, I believe, is to let people get some results right > away. If you don't get results, you simply rotate the page and try again, > and because it's relatively fast to navigate the controls, it's not hard to > do this. > > In my estimation, the actual time to OCR is not really faster than with > Prizmo. The complication that I believe most people find with Prizmo, apart > from having to practice the alignment and holding things flat and in good > light, is that there are multiple steps, even though most of this is just > double-tapping the "Next" button in the top right corner. And if Prizmo were > to implement a "quick process" mode where it assumed all the defaults and > that you'd make no changes at all (since you need vision to crop, adjust > images, etc.), I bet that would make things a lot easier for VoiceOver users. > > With Text Detective you still have to hold things flat, aligned, and in good > light, but there are fewer steps. It is also more tolerant of slight > alignment errors, just as Prizmo is more tolerant of such errors than most > OCR programs (believe it or not). > > For people who are having difficulty pressing the "Start Scan" button in Text > Detective while holding the phone flat, try putting your forefinger on the > button while you hold the phone in landscape mode with your two hands, but > keep your middle finger free. Then, when you have lifted your phone to the > correct height, use a split tap with your middle finger to press the button > without shaking the phone. > > I think Text Detective has good features, but won't give full page > information in its current mode. By the way, Perfect OCR supports Russian, > although I haven't tested that out yet -- just the French. And TextGrabber > gives the full range of ABBYY's OCR language support, so should also support > Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, etc. in addition to the above. > > HTH. Cheers, > > Esther > > On Jul 21, 2012, at 10:33 AM, Anne Robertson wrote: > >> Having looked at the description of this app, I see no reference to other >> languages, and yet it is in the French appstore. Does it support any other >> languages? >> >> Cheers, >> >> Anne >> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the "VIPhone" Google > Group. > To search the VIPhone public archive, visit > http://www.mail-archive.com/viphone@googlegroups.com/. > To post to this group, send email to viphone@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/viphone?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "VIPhone" Google Group. To search the VIPhone public archive, visit http://www.mail-archive.com/viphone@googlegroups.com/. To post to this group, send email to viphone@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/viphone?hl=en.
