Upgrades to the KNFB Reader
Contributed by Joel Zimba, Special Projects Coordinator, MDTAP
Less than a year after its initial release, there is exciting news for the KNFB Reader app. Perhaps most importantly, iOS will no longer be the exclusive home to KNFB. In the near future, the Android app will also be available. This will, in effect, drive down the cost of a hand-held reading machine to just a bit more than the app itself. The significant cost of Apple’s hardware will cease to be a barrier to reading printed text on the go.
Both platforms will also gain a handy new feature. Under the “Profile” menu, the “Scan Stand” option will allow you to scan multi-page documents by just switching pages, while the KNFB Reader sits happily on a scanning stand and snaps pictures when text is detected. In a quick test on my office desk this afternoon, I scanned a ten page document in about a minute. With a bit of experimentation, capturing and recognizing an entire book could be done in little more than a half hour. Stay tuned for timed tests with such ambitious projects.
There are other welcome tweaks, like automatic saving to dropbox. A cloud-based backup and restore feature is also useful. These great features will be free to all current users.
