Last year, however, Chen began experimenting with Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI), called Vision Framework, that’s built into the latest iOS versions, along with Google’s Tesseract, TensorFlow Lite, and ML Kit. Either of these would have raised the price I have to charge too much for my value proposition.”
#Text scanner and reader license#
“The ones that do work well are quite expensive, either as a one-time license purchase with each app sold or with ongoing pay-by-the-use options. “There are some free, open source engines, but they don’t work well enough for my purposes,” he says. The hurdle Chen kept encountering was finding a useable OCR engine. “It would be useful for reading protected PDF’s and handouts and memos from school and work.” “I’ve been wanting to add OCR to Voice Dream Reader for a few years now,” says Chen. At the time, Apple’s VoiceOver cut and paste features and other block text manipulation capabilities were,shall we say, not quite what they are today? The innovative way Chen handled these functions made Voice Dream Writer equally useful to users with visual impairments. “Sometimes it’s easier to proofread your document by listening to it instead of simply rereading the text,” says Chen. No one was more surprised than me when I began receiving feedback from dyslexic and blind users describing how helpful Voice Dream Reader was for their needs and making some simple suggestions to improve the app’s accessibility.”Ĭhen’s second offering, Voice Dream Writer, was also directed at the mainstream market. But according to Chen, “I just wanted to build a pocket reader I could use to store all my books and files so I could listen to them on the go. It works so well with VoiceOver and TalkBack, it’s hard to believe it wasn’t developed specifically for the access market. Spoiler alert-it will probably be the best $5.99 you’ll ever spend on a text recognition app!ĪccessWorld readers who use their phones to audibly read e-Pub books, PDFs or Bookshare titles are likely already familiar with Voice Dream Reader. Then we’ll take a look at the developer’s latest offering: Voice Dream Scanner. In this article we’ll start out with a brief conversation with Chen. There is a new player in the optical character recognition (OCR) space, and it comes from an old friend: Winston Chen, the developer of Voice Dream Reader and Voice Dream Writer, both of which we’ve reviewed in past issues of AccessWorld.
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