title: Towards Mobile OCR: How To Take a Good Picture of a Document Without Sight.
abstract: The advent of mobile OCR (optical character recognition) applications on regular smartphones holds great promise for enabling blind people to access printed information. Unfortunately, these systems suffer from a problem: in order for OCR output to be meaningful, a well-framed image of the document needs to be taken, something that is difficult to do without sight. This contribution presents an experimental investigation of how blind people position and orient a camera phone while acquiring document images. We developed experimental software to investigate if verbal guidance aids in the acquisition of OCR-readable images without sight. We report on our participant's feedback and performance before and after assistance from our software.
authors.affiliation: University of California, Santa Cruz, mcutter@soe.ucsc.edu.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cutter
authors.affiliation: University of California, Santa Cruz, manduchi@soe.ucsc.edu.
authors.forename: Roberto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Manduchi
keywords: Design; Document Processing; Experimentation; Human Factors; Optical Character Recognition; Visual Impairment