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OCR helping the Visually Impaired

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So what does Braille and OCR have in common?

Braille: A system of writing or printing, devised by L. Braille for use by the blind, in which combinations of tangible dots or points are used to represent letters, characters, etc., that are read by touch.

OCR: The mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text.

It’s accessibility. You see, while Braille is the traditional means of reading and writing for persons with visual impairment, OCR technology has become a high tech tool for helping visually impaired read documents that they didn’t have access to before.

I don’t believe that most people who work in the OCR industry or use an OCR product don’t even realize how OCR is used to convert the printed word into speech.  We know that OCR can convert the text on a PDF or a long forgotten written document, but it is making a difference to so many visually impaired readers.

Although not originally developed for users who are visually impaired, data capture technology offers blind and visually impaired persons the capacity to scan printed text and then have it spoken back in synthetic speech – giving them access to a greater number of written materials.

The process of inputting the material into the computer is fairly simple, and involves scanning, recognizing, and reading text. A printed document is scanned, and OCR software then converts the images into recognized characters and words. A synthesizer in the OCR system can speak the recognized text, and the information can be stored in an electronic form. By scanning print textbooks with OCR, visually impaired persons can easily convert paper pages into editable electronic format for further conversion. 

Over the years, I’ve heard of many examples of how OCR technology has been used to assist blind people on different occasions, such as this story from the Philippines, where Resources for the Blind used OCR software to convert scanned pages of books, magazines, newspapers, and images into searchable and editable electronic copies. They needed to convert some 5,000 volumes of textbooks annually and the manual process was too time consuming and resulted in typing errors and low productivity.  By scanning the print textbooks with OCR software, RBI now converts paper pages into editable electronic format for further conversion to Braille or audio format.

Do you have any personal stories of how OCR has been used to aid the visually impaired?

Comments

Submitted by Randy Weisser September 09, 2010 - 4:48 AM

Joe, just a note to say thanks once again for the huge amount of help ABBYY was to us in making textbooks accessible to blind students here in the Philippines. One correction.. It isn't that we used the software in creating the braille versions of the textbooks, as in past tense. The truth is that we use it virtually everyday in all three of our offices here in the Philippines to convert textbooks and other important documents into braille versions for our blind students and other clients. This is one of those rare cases where a product designed for the much larger sighted market has been of extraordinary benefit to the blind community. Thanks, on behalf of the many blind persons who are able to "read" with the help of your technology, Randy, Director, Resources for the Blind, Manila, Philippines

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Submitted by Chris Riley, ECMp, IOAp September 09, 2010 - 12:35 PM

Joe,

Thank you for the post. Absolutely. It's possible with not much effort to OCR a document and send it ( although with a silly voice ) to a speech engine. I was able to do this once with ABBYY engine 7 and a simple .Net speech engine and integrate it with a Kodak scan destination in a matter of an hour! So cool.

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Submitted by Theresa Resek-Resek September 09, 2010 - 12:38 PM

I was privileged to see the advent of similar technology 26 years ago as a camp counselor to the blind and visually impaired. As the resident tech person (ok, so my sole credential was that I could program in Fortran and Pascal then) I got to operate the software that was converting text to voice as we typed. Back then it could only translate phonetically, so it held vast entertainment value to us counselors… but for the adult campers still in the work force, it was a technological god-send. One man couldn’t wait to talk with his supervisors about the latest advances that could keep him on the job. I’m sure the costs back then would have been astronomical. It’s exciting to realize how accessible these technologies can be today.

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This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International