Extracting text from Images

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Extracting text from Images

Post by
ka.li
»
Mon Mar 05, 2018 12:47 pm
Hi all,
I thought I would share my method of extracting text from images on the PC. One of the features of NVDA that is neat is the ability to do OCR on objects such as images. It's called Windows 10 OCR. It only supports English for now but I'm sure more languages will be added in the near future. If you've used the text features of Seeing AI, then you'll know how good the OCR is. Well, NVDA uses Microsoft's OCR so when you do OCR on an object, you should get good results.

To use Windows 10 OCR, you'll need to be running Windows 10 and the latest copy of NVDA.

First, navigate to an object such as a graphic that you might find on a web page using standard keyboard commands. then press insert-r and a virtual document window will pop up containing the extracted text which you can review with your arrow keys. Sometimes, you might get a tiny piece of text. What may help in that case is to maximize your window with alt-space then x.

You can use this functionality for more than just graphics. You can use to this navigate inaccessible programs by focusing on the navigator object which may be the main window of a program and then doing OCR on it. In the virtual document window, you can route the mouse pointer to where you want to click and then left click on it. The NVDA manual will have more information on object Nav, mouse pointers, and Windows 10 OCR if you're interested in exploring this further.

But that's basically what I used to extract text. In the back of Hit the Ground Running, you may recall there were images of other books, OCR did a good enough job to let me know what they were but it wasn't perfect so I hunted for those books on the publisher's website and found that the book descriptions were similar to the text in the images.

Hope this helps.
ka.li
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Re: Extracting text from Images

Post by
Karoline
»
Tue Mar 06, 2018 6:05 am
Thank you for posting this. I wanted to investigate it, but haven't gotten there. I will play with it.
Karoline
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Re: Extracting text from Images

Post by
rmarion
»
Tue Mar 06, 2018 7:17 am
Thanks for posting this. I was aware of it, but had mixed results in the graphics with hit the ground running. Thanks for the suggestion of maximizing the results screen. That may solve the issue I was having.
rmarion
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Re: Extracting text from Images

Post by
skyt
»
Sat Mar 10, 2018 7:32 pm
I have tried this in NVDA on windows 10, and it does what you have said. Very nice tool!
skyt
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