JFW-friendly OCR
- From: "Alan Clendinen" <alanclendinen@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 16:33:23 -0500
Hello listers,
I recently obtained trial versions of three Optical Character Recognition
(OCR) programs, which are compatible with JFW. These programs are Freedom
Scientific's Openbook, Kurzweil's Kurzweil 1000, and Premier Assistive
Technology's Text Cloner Pro.
From my tests of these products, I have concluded that all three programs
did an adequate job with converting scanned books and other printed
materials, but Openbook and Kurzweil 1000 both carry a hefty retail price of
$995.00
Text Cloner Pro, however, retails for just $89.95. Now to be fair, I must
note that Openbook and Kurzweil 1000 include some nifty bells and whistles
that the bare-bones Text Cloner Pro doesn't have.
These more expensive OCR programs include built-in speech capability, so you
can use them without needing a separate screen-reader application. They can
also create MP3 files from scanned text. Both programs allow scanning of
graphics, which can then be saved in a variety of formats.
The Kurzweil 1000 includes a 30-day membership to bookshare.org, and also
features a utility for finding and downloading e-books from a few e-book web
sites.
The question you must ask yourself is, are the extra features worth an extra
$905.05? In my opinion, the answer is no. In fact, from my testing, I found
the built-in speech "feature" to be a real pain in the neck. It interfered
with JFW speech and numeric keypad controls. In Openbook, JFW needed to
either be unloaded or put to sleep. The Kurzweil 1000 has a configuration
setting to use JFW's speech and numeric keypad control, but it was buggy.
The built-in speech feature of these two programs is an unnecessary frill if
you already have a screen-reader program.
The installation and configuring for Text Cloner Pro was by far the easiest
of the three programs. Once it was set up, scanning and OCR conversion is
accomplished with a single keystroke.
If you are looking for a user-friendly, JFW compatible OCR program that is
inexpensive, Text Cloner Pro is a great choice.
You can learn more about Text Cloner Pro by visiting their web page at:
http://www.premier-programming.com/TextCloner/tcpro.htm
Regards,
Alan
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