[Athen] Scan to Readable PDF Question

[John Elmer]

Remember. There are educational prices available on all, or most, of this stuff.

-----Original Message-----
From: athen-list-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Karlen Communications
Sent: Saturday, September 22, 2012 6:13 AM
To: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network'
Subject: RE: [Athen] Scan to Readable PDF Question

I have a CanoScan Lide which is about 8 years old and still functioning but I found the OCR software a bit lacking as it is a lite version. ABBYY makes PDF Transform which lets you open a PDF in the application, perform the OCR and then send it to Word. I've found it a good alternative to higher priced solutions. The UI itself is not accessible but they do have keyboard commands to perform the functions. The cost is $78 USD I believe.

So it is a possible solution to be added to the list.

Cheers, Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: athen-list-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu
[mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Sean J Keegan
Sent: September-21-12 6:12 PM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network
Subject: Re: [Athen] Scan to Readable PDF Question

 > He has asked me about scanners that scan text directly into  > readable PDFs. Does anybody know if this exists? Does Zoom  > Text have OCR built into its code?

Have you looked at any of the Canon Canoscan LiDE scanners? Based on the documentation, I believe you can "scan to PDF" which will do some OCR during the processing (the OCR happens on the user's computer).  See:
http://www.amazon.com/Canon-CanoScan-LiDE210-Scanner-4508B002/dp/B003VQR1TS

Brother also makes a desktop model that offers OCR functionality:
http://www.brother-usa.com/Scanners/ModelDetail.aspx?ProductID=ADS2000#.UFzf
dxiz7x4

That being said, most people I encounter prefer to purchase a scanner and then purchase a separate OCR program to support the conversion process.  In part, the OCR application that comes bundled with scanners is a bit limited and may not offer the best recognition capabilities.

Adobe Acrobat Professional does have some OCR functionality built into the application.  That may be an option as well, although I have sometimes had issues with the recognition accuracy depending on the PDF.

Does your friend have access to the Internet?  If so, one option may be to obtain a scanner and then submit documents to an online OCR system to obtain a text-based PDF.  One service is called Sensus Access
(http://sensusaccess.com) and the results are returned to your e-mail inbox (I know the OCR engine is the Abbyy Recognition Server - very high quality).

At this time, the desktop ZoomText application does not have a built in OCR engine for PDF documents.

Take care,
Sean

--
Sean Keegan
Associate Director, Assistive Technology Office of Accessible Education - Stanford University http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/oae

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