In "ages past," in the days of DOS, Arkenstone, and perhaps Kurzweil's
dedicated reading system, someone published a program called :ScanTune" which
took your text output from one of these flat-bed readers and processed it,
following a set of rules programmed into the software and somewhat adjustable
by the user. This software would take expressions such as "tum on the fan" and
"Christ is bom" to convert them to "turn on the fan" and "Christ is born." As
I remember, it fixed some of those confusions between the digit 1 and the
lowercase "l" by looking at the context. That program disappeared strangely
when you downloaded an update but got an error saying that you needed to
contact the fellow to renew your license. Only problem: He could not be
found!
Thankfully, the modern OCR packages will do far more than did the old ScanTune
program; but some of us used it in those days and were thankful to have it.
One humorous mistake it made in my house was in a set of album notes about a
big-band album. Since I was doing the scan for a friend, I looked it over with
my Optacon and my screen reader to eliminate all the errors I could find. In
one case, it was supposed to say that one famous bandleader was a "great
saxist"; but since "saxist" was not in ScanTune's library, it dutifully
rendered the word "sexist" in place of the correct word. I corrected the
document I was going to braille, and I gave ScanTune a new word, "saxist,"
which she could choose if it fit better than "sexist" (I named my computers for
girls, and "Sharon" was running the software for me).
Even we humans make mistakes on "decoding" fonts and words. I believe that
several years ago I mentioned how in my Optacon training I encountered a word
which I read as "8008." The word was "boob'; but since I was in a serious
training course, the word "boob" was locked out of my operational vocabulary at
the moment. True, I should have been thinking more toward context; but the
idea of "serious instructional material" overrode the idea of pure context
reading. If a human can make similar errors, I have no doubt that such errors
are possible in a machine environment. Had I "opened up" the whole vocabulary
of words I know, I would have read the 8008 as boob. The instructor and I got
a big laugh out of that incident; he rightly reminded me to always keep my mind
open to the whole context in which I was reading.
We have found, and will continue to find, things that will do better than those
of old. We cannot always buy the newest thing out there, but most of us would
use wisdom to look at a new item from several standpoints and get it if we can
afford it and if it appears to be better from all the information we can get.
-----Original Message-----
From: optacon-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <optacon-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf
Of george@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2021 10:50 AM
To: optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [optacon-l] Re: A question
There are some fonts which can be difficult for even a sighted person to read.
For example with the word "turn", the letters r and n often run together,
appearing to be "tum" as in "tummy".
In order to differentiate between a letter l and a number 1, there is often a
line coming from the top and to the left at an slight downwards angle.
Consequently, in some fonts, if the numbers are not spaced enough, 111 could
appear as the letter M as in "Michael".
George
-----Original Message-----
From: optacon-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <optacon-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf
Of Ben Mustill-Rose
Sent: 10 January 2021 11:28
To: optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [optacon-l] Re: A question
Hi,
Visually o and 0 look fairly similar so that explains the o's. I've never heard
of 1 being interpreted as m before but that's almost certainly what happened.
Cheers,
Ben.
On 1/10/21, Robert Feinstein <harlynn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Listers, this is Bob from New York. I was reading something with myto view the list archives, go to:
scanner and it read "we are celebrating our moth birthday." I found
that strange, and re-scanned. Got the same results. Looked at the
page with my optacon and it said "celebrating our 100th birthday.
Totally clear. I am just curious: why would a scanner read moth
instead of 100th? I usually can figure out why an error occurs, but this
time I'm stymied.
Just curious.
Hope all of you are well and using your optacons. Bob
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