[jawsscripts] Re: Jaws 13 OCR

  • From: Doug Lee <doug.lee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: jawsscripts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:38:20 -0400

Wow... I can't address Jonathan Mosen's comments having failed to
notice them for myself, but I for one think this feature will prove
useful in some environments where it is impossible to access screen
text by more direct means and also not permitted to install
third-party software willy-nilly. This applies to a lot of corporate
settings I've seen in my 11 years of scripting JAWS in work settings.

Printing and recognizing a screen from paper, by the way, is so much
slower than this, even if you have Matrix-speed agility (pun on movie
and printer is intended there), that I simply don't recognize that
approach as comparable in work settings such as I describe.  If a
coworker asks you to read a 15-page PDF and it's all images, you could
indeed do that, even though again this approach should be much faster;
but if it's a question of reading and interacting with a graphic
screen containing text that JAWS normally can't see, printing and
scanning the screen will not let you find and actually click on the
Next button.

I confess, I'm accustomed to seeing the naysayers soon after any
release of any software from a large-market-share company (that would
apply to JAWS, Microsoft, and even Apple now); but this is one feature
of JAWS that I actually thought would fly above all that.

Disclaimer: I do not work for Freedom Scientific. I work for a
company that works with various screen reader vendors and many
government and private organizations to improve the ability of blind
employees to do their jobs in the workplace. I have written more
scripts for JAWS than for any other screen reader, but I have also
scripted for Window-Eyes on a number of occasions and have contributed
a small amount of code to NVDA (Skype related, that was).

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 12:23:54PM -0700, Andre Williams wrote:
Guys, this seems like another useless jaws feature. This OCR thing is almost 
exactly what one can do with a screen capture utility built into Windows or 
what you can download get for fee.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Take-a-screen-capture-print-your-screen

Yeah, this screen capture process might be slightly faster with jaws 13, but 
is this worth a hit on one's SMA? I say h no!

If you listen to the FS podcast you will also come across something to the 
effect of Jonathan saying that scriptors on this list were all excited about 
this new feature. I don't recall a single post on this list commenting on 
this feature. This makes Jonathan less than credible but I don't fall for 
company BS about their own products anyways. Furthermore, I wil now accept 
Jonathan's comments with a handful of salt. He's lots almost total 
credibility with me with this comment at it is blatantly disingenuous. He 
also claimed this feature to be a game changer in screen reader technology.

A-W

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Smart" <csmart8@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <jawsscripts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, September 16, 2011 8:00 AM
Subject: [jawsscripts] Jaws 13 OCR


So, have any of you played with the OCR feature in Jaws 13 beta yet?

I managed to register a program last night, whose initial
registration screen was formerly invisible to Jaws. Too bad that
once I registered the program, the rest of the application turned
out to be invisible as well. *LOL*

So far, we can ocr and then read or mouse click on the results.
In what ways could this new information gleaned through OCR be tied
to other Jaws functions? I'm thinking it would be nice to be able
to put the Jaws cursor on part of the OCR results and transfer the
text into the graphics labeler, for example.

Chris

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-- 
Doug Lee, Senior Accessibility Programmer
SSB BART Group - Accessibility-on-Demand
mailto:doug.lee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  http://www.ssbbartgroup.com
"While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done,
it was done." --Helen Keller
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