For people who are blind and use portable, capture-read software, there is a new kid in town, and he may look a little familiar. The KNFB Reader app for iOS, released in September 2014, does everything his big brothers did (i.e. such as the K-Reader Mobile), but he does it on mobile Apple devices such as the iPhone instead and for about 10% of the price ($99 US).

The KNFB Reader app captures text in books, magazines, signs, brochures, cereal boxes, etc. and immediately reads it aloud with one click (or a couple if you are using VoiceOver).  The video below gives a good example of how it works.

I highlighted some of the features below and my findings. Keep in mind with my opinions below, that I am a sighted person, and a person who is blind may have a different experience.

• Field of View Report: Tells you where your camera is relative to the page.  For example when I first took a picture, the app told me that my camera was 2 degrees relative to the page; which helped me change my position to get a better picture and therefore better text recognition.
• Tilt Guidance: This feature uses the phone’s vibration to let you know if you are level to the page. This worked very well and helped me stay level even when I could see what I was doing.
• Multi-Column  Capture: This feature allows you to capture text in the correct order when multiple columns are present. This worked well when a page of text only had columns.  Once a graphic with text or a table entered into the equation, it  inserted the scanned text right where it fell on the page, which made reading it very confusing.
• Batch Capture: This setting allows you to capture several pages at once before processing. When the text of a multi-page document is read back, it indicates which page you are on at the top of the screen (readable by voiceover) and allows you to hit an arrow key to turn the page-very nice.
• Add Page to Document: This feature allows you to add a page to a document even after you have already processed it, which I found to be very handy.
• Automatic Picture Capture: This element allows you to capture text without touching the screen, and works best while the mobile device is in a document holder. Once the page is correctly in the camera’s view, the app automatically takes the picture, allowing you to keep adding pages very easily. I found this feature to work well as directed.  It would probably be the most helpful when scanning a document such as a chapter of a book.
• Braille and high quality speech output: KNFB Reader uses Apple’s  Built-in Voice,which is easy to understand, and it  can also support use of Braille displays.
• Open PDFs in KNFB reader: This allows one to download pdfs from the internet and have them “opened with” KNFB Reader and recognized with Optical Character Recognition (OCR).  This feature worked as advertised.
• Open Image Files in KNFB Reader: With this feature, you are supposed to be able to import pictures of text from Email or Photos and have the text recognized with OCR.  However, I was not able to get this to work within the native Photos app and found out from tech support that they are working on that issue.  In addition tech support gave me a “work around” to import a photo from an email (hold down on the picture, click “Quick Look”, then choose the KNFB App) and have the text recognized. They also reported that they are working on making this easier and more available.
• Accessibility: This app is designed to work with VoiceOver, making all of the controls accessible to someone who is blind.

During these past couple weeks, I tried the app on an unlocked iPhone5 (WiFi only), a mini iPad, and an iPad Air (all with 5MP cameras or better), and all on the latest version of iOS 8.1. I found that books, brochures, small non-glare signs, and food labels (that were not curved) worked well for good text recognition.

In addition, I  found that it worked much better on the iPhone than on the iPad despite the fact that iTunes says the app works with iPads. Processing time was much longer for some documents on the iPad versus the iPhone.  I also experienced several episodes of the app hanging up and freezing during the recognition phase, where it did not do that at all on the iPhone.

Overall on the iPhone, I found this app to be very easy to use,  fast, and accurate with scanning and OCR. The speech quality was excellent, and the app highlighted the text as it spoke. The app was very flexible and allowed you to start/stop speech playback wherever you wanted in the document and switch speaking speeds at will.

We have the KNFB Reader app here at IPAT. Please contact us to set up a demonstration or rent.