This week I was looking into Optical Character Recognition software. It’s used a lot by Access and Diversity departments at Universities to support students, mostly with their readings.
Oftentimes, the texts we read in University have been around for a while. Some of them are older textbooks and others might be classic novels or excerpts of longer works. When somebody needs those old books translated into an alternative-to-text format, we can use OCR software.
Basically, the software is used when scanning a physical book, and it turns the words into an editable text file on a computer. There are usually some errors in this process, so someone then looks over the text to make sure it reads well for the student. Next, that text file can be translated into a whole variety of formats, like a digital copy, a text-to-speech audio file or even braille.
OCR technology allows us to take older texts that were produced before the digital age and translate them into some of the accessible formats we rely on and take advantage of today.
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