[Trainer-Talk] Preferred OCR software recommendation

[Barbara Johnson]

Thank you for your interesting observations.  
I have not found Recognize with JAWS to be more accurate than OpenBook, but
I'd like to know what kinds of documents you were scanning when you got
those results.  I was scanning a bill, sent as an "empty" PDF document. 
In terms of robust reliability, I still find OpenBook an excellent go-to
program for scanning textbooks and other hard copy reading.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Trainer-Talk <trainer-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Greg
Aikens via Trainer-Talk
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2019 12:28 PM
To: List for teachers and trainers of adaptive technology
<trainer-talk at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Greg Aikens <gaikens at cviga.org>
Subject: [Trainer-Talk] Preferred OCR software recommendation

Hi all,
I'm wondering what OCR software you use for teaching and recommend for
clients to purchase.

Our center has had Openbook and TextCloner Pro, but I don't believe either
are actively being developed anymore. I like the simplicity of these
products but feel they could do better with reliably recreating text
formatting, white space, etc. Also, the fact that neither has released an
updated version in quite some time does not indicate to me that they will
continue to be good solutions. I hate recommending people spend money on
outdated software.

I have been playing with JAWS OCR, which I feel is far more accurate than
Openbook, but don't like that when you copy and paste from the results
viewer to a word document, you get all kinds of invisible formatting tables
that makes the document extremely cumbersome to read, unless you go in and
remove the tables. If anyone knows a work around for this, I would
appreciate it. I also like that the JAWS OCR will work with the flatbed
scanner, although it does not support scanning multiple pages unless you
have a scanner with auto document feed.

I love and teach my clients to use RoboBraille, but know that this is not a
good solution for sensitive info, such as client documentation, etc.

We recently purchased a copy of OmniPage, which seems to be perfectly
accessible but probably a little more complicated than what the average user
needs.

I would love to hear what you guys are using.

Thanks for your help.

Greg Aikens
Senior Assistive Technology Instructor
Center for the Visually Impaired<http://www.cviga.org/>
739 West Peachtree Street NW
Atlanta, GA 30308
404-602-4285

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