FreeLists / access-uk / [access-uk] Eyepal and Top-Braille

["ari" <aridamoulakis@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,
You guys remember that I was thinking of trying the Eyepal for my scanning 
problems? Even though it comes with a thirty day money-back guarantee, I've 
decided I'll probably not do it, because I've tried to do a bit more 
searching on it, and this is what I've found:
1. It uses it's own software, but the software it uses includes the 
Finereader engine.
2. It only does English, not other languages at the moment, but they say 
next month they'll have an upgrade which will support other ones.
3. Here's some of the things I really also don't like, for some strange 
reason, at the moment you can only save one page at a time in Microsoft 
Word, you can save a whole document at once, but it then has to be in text 
format, so for me where some of my stuff has columns or tables, I don't 
think txt can really even show that properly?
4. Maybe just a irritating thing, but for the price I don't like that this 
package doesn't come with any voices whatsoever. If you don't have good 
Sappi 5 voices on your pc, it won't speak! This then also made me wonder if 
you then also need to use a screenreader to work it, so you can't really go 
from pc to pc, just install the software, connect your eyepal and use it, 
and most pc's just have sam anyway.
5. After thinking about it then for quite a bit, I actually think it's then 
quite a pricey thing for $2000. Finereader is only about 200 pounds here, 
and I could maybe, like I think it was Graham suggested, try that other 
scanner, the plustech, I think it was, or even a nice large a3 scanner is 
cheaper, and it's easier to fit a book on one of those. Even expensive 
software like OpenBook costs half as much as this, and I'm not even sure how 
specific the hardware is. I know it's probably too simplistic to think of it 
as a camera on an l-shaped stand, I know it apparrently can sense when you 
turn a page, but I think I'll rather look around a bit more. It's probably 
not overpriced or anything like that, but I just think it's not really what 
I want to spend on exactly. I was also not too sure from the email I got of 
the scanning range of this thing with a book. As much as I can understand, 
if the page is an a4 page, then it will take a photo of the whole thing, but 
if it is larger, like if the book has two a4 pages next to each other, you'd 
have to do positioning anyway.
This isn't really a scanner, I don't know how comfortable it would be to 
read a book like this, but out of interest, has anyone heard of this new 
device which I read about in Imfama, the magazine of the SANCB. It's from 
France, called the Top-Braille, and it really sounds quite fascinating, 
although I'm scared to even think how much it costs. The site is in French, 
but what you do is you click on the first link, the one with the graphic, 
and a new browser opens in another window, and there's an English link. This 
thing took this company 10 years to develop! I wonder if it works with 
English braille.
www.visionsas.com
Ari 

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