[Trainer-talk] Stand Alone Scanner

[Blaine Clark]

Have you considered using a web cam mounted on a stand and aimed down 
toward a table or desktop on which the reading material is moved around 
or if the mount is mobile, the camera can be moved over the material? 
The web cam can be operated  through any program that can either adjust 
resolution and magnification or a magnifier program can enlarge portions 
of the program's window on your computer monitor. I've done this with 
Linux, a cheap $15 web cam hung on the edge of my monitor and the 
program for Linux called Cheese to see for myself how easily it can be 
done. With the cheap web cam the results weren't bad at all. I could 
read the fine print on a garden seed package with no problems, but it 
could have been better with a better web cam with better resolution or 
if I had used a magnifier program. You would want some other type of 
mounting arm above a table to afford more clearance to move the material 
than what I used, especially large pages such as newspapers, but that 
could be easily done with some scrap wood and some clamps or screws.

There has to be a way to do this in Microsoft, but if there isn't it can 
be easily done in Linux. I don't think you can do this much less 
expensively or with more flexibility. Depending on the quality of the 
web cam and the features of the viewing program plus the bit of mounting 
hardware or wood to securely hang the camera on you should be able to 
put this together for much less than $100, perhaps even under $50.