[Athen] Hebrew language OCR

[D Krahmer]

Thank you Lorraine, I'm reaching out to them!

Wink, that information is super helpful! The situation is that a PhD
student is doing their thesis on the history of Jewish Poetry, and we're
trying to get them accessible pdf/epubs of some out of print books where
the publisher has disappeared/non-responsive. With Abbyy OCR (newest
version) and Omnipage, they're just getting gibberish, which might be
related to the known issue with Arabic with Abbyy (it still has issues with
the right-to-left text). Or it might be because these are high level
academic texts in Older Hebrew with Modern annotations. We have no in-house
expertise, and the vendors we've contacted refused because they can't
guarantee accurate and accessible Hebrew.

The dept is in the process of hiring an expert, but it'll take a very long
time and doesn't help the student access these texts right now. We're also
looking at perhaps doing high quality scans of the books that the student
can use intensive magnification on. So any help or suggestions or referrals
are appreciated!

Thanks,
D.

On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 3:58 PM foreigntype at gmail.com <foreigntype at gmail.com>
wrote:


> A tidbit of techy information for those who are interested

> in text-to-speech or screen reading tips for Hebrew.

>

> Here is a really good text-to-speech program for Hebrew: Narakeet

> <https://www.narakeet.com/tools/>.

>

> In keeping with the state slogan from Missouri "Show Me," I decided to

> test this out this morning and ran the first chapter of the book of Ruth in

> Hebrew, saved as a PDF file and ran it through Abbyy Fine Reader, selecting

> English & Hebrew as the recognition languages. I uploaded the file to

> Narakeet . My Hebrew is somewhat rusty now, but from what I could tell it

> read the file correctly. I do remember in my foreign language translation

> profession days that there was some trick to typing Hebrew incorrectly in

> the Microsoft operating system software to get the vowels to be placed

> properly. Now with an international version of the Microsoft operating

> system it's easy enough to switch the direction in which a language is

> written, in this case right to left, and the vowels are placed correctly

> after the consonants.

>

> Jaws 18

> <https://support.freedomscientific.com/downloads/jaws/JAWSWhatsNew?version=18#:~:text=Starting%20with%20JAWS%2018%2C%20we,version%20of%20JAWS%20including%20English.> is

> now available and works in Hebrew with right to left reading capabilities.

>

> What is the output you need for your student? Text-to-speech? Screen

> reader accessible?  Braille?

>

> If your student needs to have this in EPUB format, here's some information

> on how to convert to an EPUB 3 for access in Hebrew.

> <https://ebooks.stackexchange.com/questions/6804/can-kobo-read-hebrew-epubs>

>

>

> Wink Harner

> Accessibility Consultant/Alternative Text Production

> The Foreign Type

>

> Portland OR

> foreigntype at gmail.com

>

> This email was dictated using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Please forgive

> quirks, misrecognitions, or errata .

>

>

> On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 11:08 AM D Krahmer <dkrahmer2 at gmail.com> wrote:

>

>> Hi everyone,

>>

>> Is anyone familiar with a vendor who does Hebrew language OCR?

>>

>> Our SDS office has tried multiple programs (Abbyy and OmniPage) to try to

>> automatically OCR Hebrew Language Materials, but it just produces too many

>> errors or just plain gibberish. We haven't heard back from the publisher,

>> and we're trying to get an OCR version of some books for a student.

>>

>> Any recommendations?

>>

>> Thanks,

>> D.

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