Produced by DocScanner, SayText is specifically designed for people who are blind or vision impaired and uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This is a technology that takes an image or picture of a document and electronically translates it into text.
This text can then be read out using Apple’s inbuilt screen reader VoiceOver.
When you take a picture of a document, a beep tells you when the whole document is in the picture, and the camera will shoot automatically when focused.
Once the picture is taken, the OCR process will start automatically. When the process is finished, you can tap the screen to listen to the document.
You can watch a video of a person using SayText on YouTube.
Our own hands-on testing has yielded mixed results. For one, we could not get our iPhone to beep when the document was in focus – at a guess this could be because the camera could never achieve full focus. One document that we scanned (repeatedly) yielded very poor quality text. There was a lot of gibberish, and very few words were detected correctly. A different document however resulted in text that was very close to the original. Other users have had similar experiences.
Despite this, DocScanner should be applauded for not only releasing this application free of charge, but also customising it to be used by people who are blind or vision impaired.
You can download the SayText app now from the Apple iTunes store.
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