[nabs-l] ScanSnap

[T. Joseph Carter]

He all,

I was wondering if any of you had ever seen the Fujitsu ScanSnap 
sheet-fed scanners?  The marketing materials make it sound like a 
truly remarkable little device.

The portable version can be connected to two USB ports (needed for 
power) and folds down into something the size of a box of aluminum 
foil.  The desktop version folds up into a "blobject" smaller than 
most inkjet printers.

Supposedly what sets the thing apart is how you use it.  Plug the 
thing in, open it up, stick documents into the hopper, press the 
button, and watch the show.  The show consists of two-sided scanning, 
handling of different-sized pages, correcting skewed documents, and 
depending on what you've configured it to do, it can also OCR the 
documents and do other post-processing.

The software suites vary between Mac and PC, but on the PC side the 
software includes Acrobat, FineReader, and CardMinder, as well as its 
own document manager.  The Mac version exists (and it's what I'd buy 
for myself), but I wonder how accessible the software is to Windows 
screen readers?

The major thing about this device is that it is not TWAIN or ISIS 
compliant.  You could arrange that via the UNIX SANE system and 
whatever passes for a TWAIN-SANE bridge for Windows, but that's just 
crazy-talk in my mind.  It's really meant to use with its own 
software, and its own software generates documents, not images.

Has anyone tried it?  I suspect the basic scanner driver probably 
works well, and you could then set it up to open PDFs with whatever 
you like.  (Most Windows ScanSnap users recommend OneNote, but blind 
users may find any number of other things to use..)  I wonder though 
if the ScanSnap Organizer is even remotely usable by a blind person.

Flatbed scanners are just horrid for anything but pictures, in my 
mind.  I'm kind of excited by the prospect of the ScanSnap because 
people say it really is what it claims to be: A document scanner, 
designed to get paper into your computer in an indexed, sorted, and 
searchable way.  Stick "accessible" in there somewhere and Fujitsu is 
gonna sell a lot of these things to blind people.

Joseph