Optical character recognition software is some of the most amazing stuff I’ve ever seen! It is also one of the technologies that has come the farthest in my lifetime.
I first put my hands on a reading machine in the mid-1980s. The public library in my town got a “Kurzweil reading machine”–the hope was probably to attract blind patrons to use the library. The reading machine sat on the floor and was so big that I could pull a chair up to it like a desk–truly a massive piece of technology!
A few years later, a new desktop model was developed called the Kurzweil Personal Reader. In time this gave way to the Reading Edge, which weighed “only” 30 pounds. One of these machines came into my possession in 1994. My life was forever changed. No more relying on human beings who sometimes didn’t show up to read my homework to me. I could read at my own (very fast) pace for as long as I needed to. I could choose not to read and take my own responsibility for failure instead of failing because someone else didn’t show up to read to me. And I could roll the machine on a luggage cart into the library to scan journal articles, save them onto a disk, and pop them into a computer for later viewing! I imagine that other students must have wondered what on earth I was hauling around at break-neck speed–I had a dog guide who was quite a sprinter at the time. I really did not care. I could read almost anything, and I did read almost anything in the psychology or special education sections of the library.
The poor old scanner did its job faithfully for some 12 years, only being serviced once. In 2006, it suddenly called for help once more–just at the time when I was about to enter seminary. I had it serviced but also decided I needed to have a second scanning solution on hand. It would not do to be stopped in my tracks in the middle of a graduate school program that required me to read a minimum of 400 or 500 pages a week.
I had one requirement for a new scanner: it must be a book-edge scanner, meaning the glass must reach the edge of the machine. Most scanners are made for scanning pictures, not books. The beds are flat, but there is machine all the way around the glass. When scanning books on these machines, it is necessary to hold the book down very flat in order to capture as much text as possible; and often text close to the margin is cut off. I was able to locate a fairly new scanner, the OpticBook 3600. This was a commercial book-edge scanner that would work with any optical character recognition software.
Two major OCR solutions are available for users who are blind. Both provide spoken output so that the user can read as the material is scanned. I opted not to purchase either of these programs. Instead, I purchased a commercial program called FineReader Professional. I had evaluated a demonstration version and found that it worked with my screen reader; and I supposed that since I would be reading my books in MicroSoft Word, I did not need the extra synthesized speech feature that comes with Kurzweil or OpenBook. I did not know how prophetic my choice would be.
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