[PLUG] [Jocr-devels] gocr and the blind (fwd)
Rich Shepard
rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Wed Mar 31 06:28:02 UTC 2004
In light of this week's InnoTech show at the Convention Center, and that
too many clever and talented denizens of our group here are
under-/un-employed, I thought it worth while to pass on this message from
another mail list, one devoted to the jocr OCR project.
Pooling talents to produce products that the blind could use to get
readable materials would be an effort with a high degree of satisfaction
even if it produces little or no income. Perhaps output to a voice
synthesizer would also be possible so printed material could be transformed
into braille or speech.
My mother depends on the taped books she borrows from the library at the
New York Lighthouse for the Blind. Having access to FOSS software on
commodity hardware would allow many more publications to be made available
to those who can no longer see.
Rich
--
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 12:21:29 -0800
From: Oliver D. Iberien <oliver.iberien at mindspring.com>
I was just listening to a BBC Radio 4 broadcast about the trouble the blind
in Britain have in locating books of any real quality to read. I wondered
why they weren't simply using scanners, OCR, and braille displays and/or
speech synthesizers along with printed books. It turn out that the basic
software sold to the blind is very expensive. This is $1000
(http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_news/nr_OB7S.asp), not including a
speech sythesizer. (It's thousands more for a braille display).
It seems to me that someone could string something together using gocr, or
similar, to give the blind affordable software and hence better access. I
don't know if anyone is working on such a thing, but if so, you might want to
contact the BBC broadcasters at intouch at bbc.co.uk. The website is
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/intouch.shtml.
Oliver
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