Freedom Scientific’s OpenBook is an extraordinary tool that allows blind and visually impaired persons to read almost any printed and electronic document. Documents on paper are scanned and converted into text with its highly accurate OCR capabilities, while electronic files are opened and transformed into readable text on the fly. Once converted, OpenBook’s high-quality synthetic speech will read it aloud for you.
OpenBook connects directly with your scanner, converts the scanned image into text, and displays the result in your screen. Its high-end optical character recognition (OCR) technology provides a fast and accurate representation of the texts included in the page. You will not need to worry about page orientation, columns, graphics, etc., as OpenBook performs a deep analysis of the scanned page before presenting it to you. You can always compare with the original by using its Split View, which allows you to browse both documents simultaneously. If the document already exists in electronic format, just open it and OpenBook will read it directly to you. The text formats supported are TXT, DOC, RTF, HTML, and XML, together with OpenBook’s native document formats (OBX and ARK) and Bookshare files. When opening PDF and image files, the program will automatically perform the necessary OCR conversion processes.
Once the text is conveniently formatted, OpenBook offers you two quality TTS (text-to-speech) engines to choose from – RealSpeak Solo and Eloquence. The audio generated by any of these tools can be saved into MP3 or WAV files, which can then be transferred to your favourite portable audio player. Besides, OpenBook offers you efficient two-way connectivity with your personal Braille note taker, allowing you to transfer all your documents to and from your computer in seconds.
Low vision users can easily customize most layout settings to fit their specific needs – text and background colours, font sizes, font types, character spacing, and so on. All these settings can be saved for future use. The whole application is self-voiced, making it very easy for blind users to move through the different menus and options without losing track of where they are.
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