Contributed by Joel Zimba, Technology Outreach Specialist, MDTAP
I’ve used Prizmo on the iPhone for a couple of years. It’s a full-featured OCR app. It is also unique in that the scanning is performed locally, rather than uploading the image to a server and then retrieving the results. With all phone-based scanning packages, getting the picture is always the trick.
Now there is Prizmo for the Mac. For only $49.99, you get a similarly powerful OCR package which is fully accessible. In fact, the folks at Prizmo have added a few accessibility features, such as announcing when a page is blank or entirely black which can help with figuring out just why there is no text.
For those of you not in the know, OCR stands for optical character recognition. The process of taking text in an image and turning it into the kind of text you would find in a word processing file or E-book. The difference is not always obvious to the uninitiated.
So far, my non-scanner-equipped Mac has performed remarkably well with image files of text. I have an owner’s manual for a piece of audio gear which, while technically in electronic format, is just the graphical images of the pages. The OCR version of the first few pages is good and some of the layout is even preserved using tables, which is a neat trick I’ve not seen replicated in other OCR packages.
And be sure to stick with us as we look at more options on the market, especially since there were some brand new ones announced at the CSUN conference just last week.
