Accessing Books and Documents

Abstract

Reading is an essential daily living task, and is crucial for school and work. Whether it is sorting the bills, reading a textbook or the daily newspaper, access to reading is critically important to people with disabilities that prevent easy reading of the printed page. Assistive technology has been created to address these needs and bridge the accessibility challenge to print. One of the first challenges is acquiring the text from the printed page. This need is met through optical character recognition that turns an image of the printed page into an accessible digital text file. In this chapter, the fundamentals of OCR technology and reading machines are described. The new international standard for digital talking books, the DAISY standard, is explored. The critically important move to direct digital access to textbooks and newspapers is projected and a discussion of future technological development closes the chapter.