Way to go Jamie! The book sounds like one I'll really enjoy reading, and I appreciate your sharing your time with us. The first couple of scans seem to be the hardest for most people because they're learning how their scanner behaves with different kinds of print. Do you know that your Omnipage can scan a batch of pages and let you go do something else while it recognizes the images? I scan a couple of pages as a sample test to make sure I'm using good settings. I like to turn on some good music or an audiobook while I scan. Sometimes I listen to my speech reading a Bookshare book. I find myself getting into a sort of groove since I scan pages in a batch and then let them recognize while I do something else. It's relaxing like the process of knitting is for some women.
Yes, there are scanners that can scan in 15 seconds. Mine takes about 45 seconds per page. The price of scanners has dropped like a stone over the past five years so that one can get a decent scanner for less than $100. My first scanner cost $1,300 and felt like it weighed a ton! My current scanner cost me $79 and weighs about a pound. Products designed for blind people often cost 3 times what sighted people pay to do the same thing. The scanner is one piece of assistive technology that has benefited from sighted people wanting to use it. We use it differently, but the wider market has meant that prices came down and that quality is being steadily improved.
I'm rambling and probably should send this before I progress to babbling. :) Thanks, Jamie, for taking the time to learn to scan and for helping us. You're part of making a lot of people's dreams come true, dreams of being free and able to read books of our choice when we are in the mood to read them.
Monica Willyard At 04:25 PM 11/15/2006, you wrote:
Well, it only took me a few weeks, but I just finished scanning a book that I read and really enjoyed.
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