Saturday, October 19, 2013

Scan and Read Software

Scan and Read software can help many students with disabilities. The device works by scanning the text with a scanner. It is then converts the printed document to text that you can edit and read on the computer. It also reads the text to you.

Who can benefit from this program?

  • Students with 
    • dyslexia 
    • visual impairment 
    • learning difficulties
    • those whose physical impairments that prevent them from handling and reading the printed words
 (Snow.idrc.ocad.ca, 2013)

My biggest issue while looking over this product was the price. The first one I looked at was over $1000 on sale! Luckily, I came across this website that gave me a list of free (yes, FREE!!) options to choose from. 


Free/Open Source OCR Software/Projects

Ocrad is an open source OCR engine that works with the scanning   program Kooka and KDE (GNU/Linux and UNIX)
GOCR by GNU Public License (Linux / Mac / Windows)
SimpleOCR by Simple Software (Windows)
WebOCR by Expervision (Windows)
FreeOCR by Tesseract (Windows)
Microsoft Office Document Imaging (Windows)

(Snow.idrc.ocad.ca, 2013)

Tutorial on Open Book ($$$$)

The program seems relatively easy. You take the document and place it on the scanner. Open the program and press the space bar to begin scanning. To read the whole document, go to Num Lock and press enter. To read the document line by line, use the arrow keys. To stop, press the control bar. You can edit the document and save it. 



References

Snow.idrc.ocad.ca (2013). Scanning and Reading Software | SNOW. [online] Retrieved from: 
http://www.snow.idrc.ocad.ca/content/scanning-and-reading-software [Accessed: 20 Oct 2013].

1 comment:

  1. I'm glad you mentioned the price. It seems a lot of AT devices cost a pretty penny. In this instance, you need a computer and a scanner, not to mention the software itself. Thankfully, you found a free site that I'll be saving and hopefully using in the future! Great find.

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