Alright. So we are making a little progress. I took a photo of the business card with the camera app and found something that said ‘recognize’ with Seeing AI. I turned it on. It said ‘processing’ and that is as far as it got. How to get it to the Seeing AI app? No clue.
Before, I forgot to get NaturalReader into the mix. I was not able to take a photo of anything and have it read on NaturalReader. I wasn’t. Does not mean you cannot. It just means it is not obvious about how to do it. NaturalReader does allow you to type your own short message and have it electronically read back to you. It also allows you to cut and paste a short electronic message into the works and have it read. That appears to be its short document function. [Don’t confuse this with an app called Natural Reader (space between the words) which is a text-to-speech reader for Windows 10. The one that Sue is writing about is NaturalReader and is available for Apple and Android. There is a free version which is what Sue uses but also one for $9.99 with many more features – not sure what they are.]
In addition NaturalReader allows you to download books from out-of-copyright book sites and webpages. On NaturalReader you can get page after page of text, entire books in fact, without having to take a photo. It does, of course, have to be in digital form first. NaturalReader can read all of your email and blog posts.
I have not read digital files using KNFB Reader but there does appear to be a way to download things from Dropbox. Do I know how? Not a clue. If it is not obvious and intuitive it does not happen for me. If anyone wants to figure that one out and pass on the info, I am all ears. I am not only not Becky Home Ecky, I am not Becky Techy either.
Looking at Seeing AI, I discovered there is a feature that tells you how to center a page but it did not activate when I took the photo. Maybe. About the closest I got to a correction was a voice that kept repeating “no idges visible”. I took that to mean no images but could it really be no idges? That might have been it. [Lin/Linda here: ‘idges’ is not a typo, that’s what Sue heard.]
Bottom line on the document function for me is this: for digital data, I like NaturalReader. NaturalReader is free, by the way, so having that in addition to Seeing AI should not be an issue.
For short documents I like KNFB reader because the camera is right there on the screen and there is no futzing back and forth between apps. That is if you have to use the camera for menus or whatever. For digital data, I am back to NaturalReader for even the shorter stuff. It loads easily. All you do is go to the little plus sign and click it. Find webpage and enter the name of the webpage. It will then read it to you. It also works with Dropbox and a few other things.
It generally takes me a long time to master anything like this, especially if I am trying to figure it out all on my own and especially when I cannot see so well. I may very well be missing important details and shortcuts. That means you may be as well. Pooling our resources on this may help. Anyone else using these apps? Thoughts? Pointers? Let us know. We could use some help here. We? I could use some help here!
Written December 26th, 2017