[bksvol-discuss] Introduction/Possibly Difficult Question...
- From: "Chris Hofstader" <cdh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 24 May 2008 09:00:32 -0400
Hi,
I've been working as a contractor for BSO for some time now and have been a
member for a very long time. A few friends of mine on the blind programming
mailing list and I wanted to find a way to get our very nerdy books scanned
and onto Bookshare.org. I volunteered to get a scanner and my sighted wife
volunteered to do a lot of verification and add textual augmentations to
describe diagrams and such. In theory we were off and running.
Disaster one hit when we found out that our trusty, albeit ancient, Epson
scanner had stopped working and that there were no drivers for it to be used
with Vista, now mostly a requirement in our household. So, undeterred, I
surfed over to the newegg.com web site and started searching for a
replacement scanner that had one requirement - a reasonably sized document
feeder.
I came upon two that sounded pretty good. One was an Epson with a 30 sheet
document feeder and the other was the Xerox DocuMate 152. Both cost about
$350 and because the Xerox supported duplex scanning and had a 50 sheet ADF,
I chose it.
At this point, dismay turned into anticipation as we waited for the shiny
new scanner to arrive at our house which it did late Wednesday afternoon.
Like kids on Christmases Eve we had to wait to open it the following day as
that evening had already been booked.
Susan, my lovely wife, took the thing out of its box early Thursday,
assembled the small number of parts one needs to attach and started loading
the software. Here is where the real fear and loathing starts. First off,
the document says nothing about having to download special drivers for
Vista; the box says "Vista Ready" and the installation routine says nothing
about downloading anything special for the newish OS. OF course, at the end
of the list of instructions, it gave a URL for getting the Vista drivers
but, by that time, we had already ground poor Susan's main PC to a near
haul. Fortunately, Vista has restore points so she was able to
automatically back out most of the install and get the rest out via the
control panel.
We then attached the device to an old XP machine that we use for backups (we
have a pair of monstrous external drives that mirror each other and hold all
of our important data attached to it). This is a five or six year old
absolutely vanilla Dell with nothing special that might cause hardware
conflicts.
Following the instructions on the installation CDs to the letter of the law
(not exactly an easy task with JAWS) I got everything to install without any
crashes and only the typical reboots that accompany most any installation
procedure. It was now time to turn on the beast and give it a try.
I powered it on using its own power switch and opened OmniPage 15. JAWS
says for help using OmniPage hit F1 twice quickly. Often JAWS keystrokes
teach me a bit about the application so I took a look at what they had. It
turned out to be documentation on how to use OmniPage 10.0 with JAWS and
said that it didn't necessarily work with other versions. JAWS worked
poorly with version 15 but good enough to try to get the scanner going.
I went to the OmniPage 15 File/Get Page/Scan menu and hit ENTER. This put
me into a dialogue that asked if I wanted to download the latest scanner
database and then choose which one I wanted to use with my hardware. I
followed the instruction and on the next page of the wizard, chose the top
one of three drivers available for the DocuMate 152. It then told me that
not all tests were run but gave me only a "finish" button to proceed which I
pressed.
OmniPage then told me that an unspecified error had occurred. I tried the
other two drivers with identical results (except once when I did get an
error message but for no reason obvious to me the pages I had in the ADF got
sucked through the scanner. I fiddled about with all sorts of different
settings that looked like they might be helpful and even when to the
scanners and cameras page in Control Panel only to crash while moving
through its tabs.
So, utter dismay and despair, fear and loathing.
I called the 800 number for Xerox technical support and connected with a
pretty well uninformed individual who, after having me try a few things,
said that she would have to call back on Tuesday afternoon and do something
using remote access to take over my PC to get it figured out. More fear and
loathing as I had forgotten this was a holiday weekend.
I tried a few more things with the device and made no progress.
A relatively low cost scanner with a 50 page duplex ADF would be great for
scanning whole books. Said scanner that sits like a toaster on my desk is
of no use to anyone.
So, after my long tale of disappointment and misfortune, does anyone here
have any ideas about how to get a Xerox DocuMate 152 running either on XP or
Vista?
Frustrated,
cdh
Other related posts:
