[macvoiceover] Re: Th iPhone as personal reader

Hi Greg,
This depends on the type of camera and how good it is. There are open source ocr engines you could try. The trick will be to hack the phone. As for making it a daisy player, no keys. 

On Jan 9, 2007, at 6:59 PM, Greg Kearney wrote:
Here are some ideas I have bouncing around in my head on this day when the iPhone was announced. Given that the iPhone is running OSX and has a camera could it be made into a personal reader or, be still my heart, a DAISY playback device.
A few months ago the NFB introduce a personal reader. For those of you who have not seen this it is nothing more than a camera linked to a Windows Mobile PDA running special ORC and reading software. It sells for, wait for it now... $3000.
Now I'm wondering if we could do the same thing with the Apple iphone, it has a camara and OSX so could we develop OCR software that could rotate the pages as needed and then read back what ever the camera was pointed at, say a book for example. Once the pages were turned into text the images of the pages could be deleted. Given that the iPhone is under $800 this kind of application could be a considerable cost savings in addition to producing a reader which is quite a bit more portable. It would be even better if the phone is accessible and could function as a phone as well. The NFB reader software takes over the PDA functions and they are not available for use.
The next question is could it also have a DAISY playback given that it has OSX running inside of it?
All these question await so communication from Apple as to how accessible this iPhone is. 

Greg Kearney


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