Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

 

What does Optical Character Recognition (OCR) do?

OCR is a process of converting scanned images to recognizable printed text by a computer or other electronic devices. The process of converting a printed document to electronic, through scanning, does not always produce an accessible document.

Inaccessible scanned documents are images that are not recognized as containing text by an assistive program such as a screenreader.  For example:

 

 

 On the right, you should see is an image of a scanned document.  

 A sighted user can recognize the characters in an  image, but an assistive program like the JAWS  screenreader will only “see” an image. It cannot read the text on the page. is is the  

Follow this link to view an accessible version: 

OCR Accessible Version of the image on the right.