Screen OCR

Anyone ever try to get screen ocr to work in SL?

Huh? Screen OCR? As in optical character recognition? Mabe you need to explain what you mean 'cuz otherwise I'm thinkin' why you would put your computer screen on your scanner to get the text that is already on your computer back into your computer optically...

Optical Character Recognition is indeed what I mean; as a specific example, one should be able to use Screen OCR to enable a program to read and respond to text that appears in the chat history window, without have to use email or remote procedure calls and suffer through the delays and limitations SL imposes.

Screen OCR programs read the pixels that make up the screen display.

Screen OCR is used to read text aloud for visually impaired folks when programs don't make any better way available.

It should be possible to achieve a very high rate of accuracy for screen OCR in SL given that the data for the pixels comprising the characters are extremely uniform and don't involve innacurate mechanical devices like printers and scanners.

There are a variety of commercial packages intended to OCR text on the screen, but I am not aware of any freeware/open source programs (Clara OCR appears to be dead). Am not aware of any particular traits of the SL client that should interfere with any OCR application.

For my solution: Not yet, getting there. I need to finish coverting my integer FFT to 2D for the approximate image matching first, then will get toward text area and character recognition.

I think what you are looking for is called "text to speech" software.

Well, there is a program that has (or did anyway) a free version called Readplease that you can copy/paste text from SL and have it read back to you. One would assume anyone using SL would be able to select text and be able to copy it. Win XP includes something like this as well but I haven' t messed with it much. Dragon Naturally Speaking has a function that allows it to read any text you highlight. I don't see a big demand for something like this for the visually impared playing SL, kinda the same reason you don't see braille on airplane or car controls much.

No, I am not talking about text to speech software at all, although I can see how you might think so, since I mentioned an application of screen ocr that irequires that the text produced by screen ocr be fed to tts program. Programs like ReadPlease don't process pixels, they perform their efforts on letters encoded as text files, html files, etc.

Screen OCR is the conversion of pixels to text. Text to speech converts characters to simulated spoken sound.

I didn't suggest that my purpose for using it was to assist the visually impaired with using SL.

Being able to run a program on your computer that can respond to the text in the chat window, or read the PG-M status or parcel name in the menu bar, or in general recognize and respond to the text displayed on the screen does not involve any conversion to audio.

The idea that there aren't people with visual impairments participating in Second LIfe is quite wrong. Visual impairment doesn't mean totally blind. When I reached 40, I acquired a very common type of visual impairment, it's called presbyopia. It's what makes us old folks need reading glasses. There are, I am sure, plenty of people participating in Second Life who need to wear glasses or contact lenses, these are generally used to correct a visual impairment.


I have the program AutoIt, it enables a person to automate programs by sending keypresses and mouse actions to the operating system at a low level which are interpreted by programs as if they were actual user input. One can do the same with any normal general purpose programming language, but AutoIt is designed specifically for the function of simulating user control of a program. AutoIt can read the contects of menus, dialog boxes, message boxes, etc. in programs using conventional Windows interface controls, but Second LIfe doesn't abide by operating system conventions in its display elements, but instead uses the cross operating system standard OGL.