2012-11-14-DOC-U-Scan-Plus
Seminars@Hadley
Accessing the Printed Word with DocuScan Plus
Presented by
Ricky Enger
Moderated by
Douglas Walker
November 14, 2012
Douglas Walker
Welcome to Seminars at Hadley. My name is Douglas Walker. I’m an instructor of assisted technology here at the Hadley School for the Blind. I will be your moderator for today’s seminar. Today’s seminar topic is accessing the Printed Word with DocuScan Plus.
The presenter today is Ricky Enger. Ricky is a member of the executive team for the Serotek Corporation. She has a passion for educating people about mainstream and assisted technologies and can be found doing this each week at the SeroTalk Podcast. If you haven’t had a chance to go and check out the SeroTalk Podcast, you need to go there. They have a wealth of information there. You can find the SeroTalk Talk Podcast at and I will post that in the text chat area in just a bit. Ricky also tells us that in her spare time she enjoys reading, cooking, and spending time with family.
If you missed our seminar a couple of weeks ago, you really are going to want to go and check that out. It was on the System Access Mobile Network, and Rick gave that seminar. It was really fantastic. We will talk a little bit about how to access our archived seminars in just a little bit though. I’m really interested in learning more about today’s topic about how to access the printed word, the DocuScan Plus. I have some selfish motives here. I’m hoping to unclear my desk and actually be able to find my documents, so without further delay I’d like to welcome today’s presenter Ricky Enger.
Ricky Enger
Thank you Douglas, and thank you to everyone who is joining us today either live or later through the archive. I’m very pleased an honored to be here. This is the second seminar that I’ve done recently. The first was related to Serotek’s SamNet product. That product will come up occasionally during this conversation as well, so if you haven’t gotten to the SamNet seminar, it is available in the archives if you want to go back and check that out. There are plenty of other good archives as well. Not just mine. Lots of great Hadley seminars, so it’s great content to go back and listen to.
Today I want to talk about DocuScan Plus. As Douglas mentioned, this is a way to access the printed word be it through printed words on paper or in a PDF format. I want to mention that I’m not sure how many of you are using the Mac platform either exclusively or in addition to windows. If you do have a Mac, DocuScan Plus is great for you as well. We’ll talk about how the product is licensed in just a bit, but just be aware you can purchase DocuScan Plus, and it is cross platform. Meaning you purchase one license, and you can use it on either Windows or Mac.
I also want to mention that DocuScan Plus is a little different from traditional scanning solutions, and it’s different in that normally if you’re scanning something, you’re scanning it to your own PC. You have your scanner set up and installed and all that happy stuff and you scan a page or five. Perhaps you’re even scanning a book. Normally you would save this to your computer, and if you wanted to be able to access it anywhere else, you have to get out a trusty thumb drive or SD card or something that allows you to carry that material with you.
With DocuScan Plus, we store things in what we call the cloud which basically means it’s a server somewhere that can be accessed regardless of which machine you’re using the software on. You can scan something at school using your DocuScan Plus account, and then you can come home and access that same document from your computer without having to use a thumb drive or something similar.
We’ll talk about how that actually works as I go through and demonstrate the software.
Today the scanner I’ll be using is a LiDE 110 which is made by Cannon. There are newer models of this particular scanner. I unfortunately don’t remember the exact model numbers, but I like these Cannon LiDE scanners for one reason. They are very portable in every sense of the word. Not only are they easy to carry around, but the drivers for these scanners are present in the Windows and Mac operating system. What that means is that you can put your scanner in your backpack, you can go to someone else’s computer who maybe doesn’t have a scanner, you can plug yours in, and you don’t have to go to a website to download the driver.
Windows recognizes it automatically, and when you unplug the scanner, it goes away as if it had never been there. You’re not going to mess up your friend’s computer and have them calling you and say, “How dare you put your scanner and assisted technology and all that stuff on my machine.” No concerns there.
With this very portable scanner, you still have the software component of DocuScan Plus. Again a lot of people don’t like it if you come in and say,”Hey I’m going to install assisted technology on your computer.” They’re thinking hey I don’t need my computer to talk. I don’t want this thing taking up space on my hard drive, because I don’t use it. With DocuScan Plus, you can actually access the software in its entirety. It’s a fully functional version of the software right one the web. You can visit and the software is going to prompt you to run. Once you choose to allow the software to run, then you’re functioning with a fully functional version of the software right on this computer that is not yours. As soon as you shut down the software, it goes away as if it had never been there.
You may hear me use the phrase, “accessibility anywhere” a lot during this presentation today; because that’s one of the things that Serotek is very, very passionate about. We think that accessibility isn’t just about being able to use your own computer, it’s about being able to use computer that you happen to encounter when you’re out and about whether this is at a school library, a friend’s house. Maybe you go home to visit your parents over Christmas, and you still want to be able to do the same things that you do on your own computer, and that’s what Serotek is all about.
Now that I’ve given a little bit of background on the software, let’s take a look at how it actually works. First I’d like to mention that DocuScan Plus is a self-voicing program. Meaning that it provides its own spoken feedback that is independent of whatever screen reader you happen to be using, or you don’t even have to be using a screen reader at all. Serotek does make the system access screen reader, but there are certainly others out there as well. There’s NVDA, Window-Eyes, JAWS, and of course voice over on the Mac.
With the Macintosh voice over is used to provide spoken feedback. Otherwise the product is self-voicing, and your primary screen reader will be asleep in the DocuScan Plus window. It will wake back up if you need to alt tab and go over to Microsoft Word or something like that. The voice that I will be using today is NeoSpeech Kate. This is available for purchase, or you can use the default voice which comes with the program. That is DECtalk. Eloquence is also available for purchase, as well as Real Speak and IVONA voices.
Let’s take a look at DocuScan Plus. What I have here is a list of things that I can do in this program, and I don’t really have to access a menu. I have what essentially looks like a webpage that I can use my arrow keys or my tab key to navigate through, and I can press enter on the option that I want. The first option is simple scan, and it’s just as its name implies. You can scan pages. This is most useful in a situation where, perhaps, you’re scanning your mail and finding that most of it is junk, or you’re scanning two or three pages, and you want to later save the document.
Batch scan is for when you have a considerably larger amount of text that you want to scan. The way the batch scan works is that you scan. As soon as the scan is complete, you turn the page and continue scanning and so on. You could get 50 pages in. The program is not necessarily recognizing any of this text until you have reached the end of your batch, and you say okay now I want to process this batch of text and then save the resulting document.
Auto read scan is for a case where, perhaps, you are scanning at textbook or something like that. You want to be able to continue scanning in the background, but you want to begin reading the text that you have scanned initially. You can scan the first page. Then begin scanning the second page as you’re reading the first one. Scan a PDF file. A lot of times you will get user manuals or even menus and things like that from websites that you have saved to your hard drive and you want to be able to open these not in Adobe Reader.
Adobe Reader sometimes reads PDF’s just fine, assuming that the PDF does include text. A lot of times though what people will do, especially in the case of say a restaurant menu, is they will take a picture of the printed page, so there’s no electron text here. There’s just an image of the page, and we want to be able to convert that image into something that’s useful to us. Scanning the PDF in DocuScan Plus is a way to do this conversation.
Manage documents as its name implies, this is where you are able to perform tasks on documents that you have already scanned. Help that’s always a good one and it’s very easy to find in the software. Perhaps you have gotten stuck or little bit lost or maybe you just want to read about all the features that the software has to offer. You can check out these help documents, and we have written them not for the purpose of putting people to sleep. They’re not too terribly boring, and they can be very educational. It’s highly recommended that you check out the help documents if for no other reason than to be aware of everything DocuScan Plus can do.
Let’s check out a simple scan shall we. I’m on the simple scan link, and I’m just going to press enter to activate it. There is a very quick help bit of text that can assist you as you’re getting familiar with the software. It’s just explained what’s about to happen. I’m going to choose the continue button. I’m going to leave this on the default scanning profile, and we’ll discuss scanning profiles in just a moment. I’ve tabbed to the continue button, and I’m ready to scan the page that’s on my scanner. As you can hear we get some progress updates as this is scanning.
There’s more than you ever wanted to know about sharks. This is a page from a children’s book talking about sharks. You’ll notice that we were told that the page is right side up. Had the page been upside down, we would have been informed of that as well, or it if were sideways we would be told that as well. What can I do with this page now that I have scanned it? I can edit the page. For example, I noticed that there was a seven at the end of the page that I may not want to keep in the final document, so I could press the edit button here and take that right out. That’s pretty self-explanatory. If I’m satisfied with this particular page, I can move on and scan the next one.
Change settings, this is where we talk about scanning profiles. Print comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes and qualities, and it can be difficult for a program to understand the type of print that it’s looking at sometimes. You might have something with three columns and instead, it’s recognizing it as one single line of text, or perhaps you have a faxed document that you’re scanning, and the quality of this faxed document is really not all that. In change settings, this is where I would go in and say; okay this is a faxed document. The quality is not so great.
Then I can save that as a profile. Anytime I encounter another faxed document that is of low quality, before I begin scanning my group of pages, I can choose not the default scanning profile but rather one I have named fax. If this page had been really horribly done, perhaps, I wrinkled it up a little bit and had it all eschew on the scanner, and I wanted to adjust how the page was facing. I would use the rescan button which discards the initial page which is then scanned and does a rescan and then tries to OCR that resulting image. If I’m ready to save this document, I want to be able to refer to sharks and information about them at any time, I would choose the save document button and give this document a title.
Start over is just everything went horribly wrong. I need to go back and select a different scanning profile, and I want to rescan this page. I really want to start this whole thing all over again. I can use that button. Those are my options here. I don’t particularly want to keep this page about sharks, so I’m just going to press escape. Yes I want to get rid of sharks. I don’t want to think about them anymore.
This is how we scan from a printed page, but how about a PDF? I’m going to press enter on scan a PDF. What I have here is a standard Windows browse dialog where I can point to the drive letter and the folder where my PDF’s are and then chose a file that I want to scan. We’ll do this one. We’re talking about animals today. We talked about sharks, so why not talk about cats and litter boxes. This is a manual for a device I have called the litter robot. I’ll be doing a holiday review for this particular device on an upcoming SeroTalk Podcast holiday special, so if you’re curious about the litter robot, you can check that out.
For the moment, I’ll press enter here, and we will open this PDF for scanning. What has happened here is that I have the first couple of pages that have been recognized that I can already read and is continuing to OCR these pages in the background as you just heard. That little noise indicates the entire PDF has been recognized and is ready for me to do something with it whether that be reading it or saving it for later. I can save this document if I wanted to. That’s pretty much what we get. I’m not going to save this for the time being, so I’m going to escape again. I’ll be prompted if I’m really sure that I want to escape and not save this for posterity.
So what about documents that I have saved? Where do those go? As I mentioned before, if you chose to save to the cloud or to a server, then you’re going to be able to access these documents from anywhere. They’re not going to reside on your hard drive. You can also choose to save just to your computer, or you can save to your computer in addition to having the document stored in the cloud.
Let’s look at managing documents. One quick thing I want to point out is you’ll notice that as I arrow down, I heard five managed documents. Scan the PDF, so each of these menu items have a number associated with them. If you happen to know that managing documents is number five in this list, you can press the number five rather than needing to tab over or arrow down to that particular option. I’ll press the number five.
These are a list of documents that are currently stored in the cloud that I can access. I’m going to access the Fire House Subs menu that I have here. Rather than making you all hungry and thirsty, I’m going to stop the reading of that, and let’s see what options we have now that I am in this document. I can email this document, so if I have someone that I need to send a scan of this document to, I can press enter here. I’ll be prompted to enter their email address. Then I will choose send. This is going to send the document as an HTML attachment to the person on the other end. For those of you who have the Amazon Kindle, I believe it’s called the Kindle Keyboard now, that device has the ability to accept documents that have been emailed to it. You can then read that document later on your Kindle device. That’s what this option does.
Make a Daisy Book. This is a really great one, because sometimes you want to scan something maybe a cookbook or something like that. Then you want to be able to put it on your Daisy Book reader like the Book Port Plus or the Victor Reader Stream or the Books Sense. All of those types of players will support this Daisy format. Of course you can read it using a Daisy Reader on the PC as well. When we create a Daisy formatted book, two things happen. One is that the Daisy is available in text format, so you can navigate by character or word or paragraph, assuming that you have your book reader or your PC Daisy Reader in that mode. You’ll be able to spell whatever it is you’re looking at if you need to.