FW: USA: Online book-sharing service for the blind borrows a page from Napster

[Janina Sajka]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I have to write another HOWTO. Fortunately, this 
one is pretty short! <grin>

Actually, I discovered this by necessity a few weeks ago. I had a book 
from the library that I desparately wanted to read. So, having heard that 
scanning wasn't accessible under linux except for that ocrshop thing that 
I didn't want to spend $99 on just for one book, I rooted around in my old 
CDR's for my trusty old OpenBook Ruby. I found and installed on my Win 
system, and guess what, Windows wouldn't work anymore. Seems some kind of 
conflict with the old OpenBook SAPI stuff against the newer ones in 
Win-Eyes and JFW. Groan. 

So, I go to linux and start reading. First, I do apropos ocr -- and of 
course I find gocr. Then I do ocr scan and I find scanimage. Hmmm, says I, 
let's do man scanimage, well, and would you believe there it was.

So, I created a temporary directory for myself, and studied the commands 
for scanimage. I soon discovered I could put a switch onto my command line 
that would give me time to turn the page in the book and reposition it on 
the scanner. I forget what it is--but it's there. This let me push a 
button on my scanner to scan the next page. So, I did that. Now, I had 600 
files in this temp directory--one file per page of this book.

Next I ran them through gocr.

What can I say? I'm reading.

Is it as good as K1000 or the new OpenBook? I have no opinion. I wouldn't 
know. 

Does it have a friendly intuitive front end. Absolutely. The best!

<big grin>



On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, Ann Parsons wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Janina, you better not keep talking like that.  You better not,
> because if you do, I'm going to demand lessons in SANE and GOCR and
> I'm going to want to know every single thing about it.  Further, if I
> discover that this stuff works out of the box for an inexperienced
> user like me, I'm going to trash Windows so fast you won't have time
> to blink!  
> 
> How well does this stuff work?  How well does it work with speakup?
> What's the learning curve like?  In short, give me the straight scoop,
> all of it, mind, the whole scoop! 
> 
> Ann P.
> 
> 

-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

Chair, Accessibility SIG
Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF)
http://www.openebook.org