KNFBReader For iOS Now Available For Download From The App Store

How does having a phone in a case stop you using tilt assist? I have mine in a keyboard case and tilt assist works fine, yes it makes the phone heavier but it still works fine.

My thery is this. Maybe the case will block part of th camera so tilt assist can't work as well?

Take care.

Is tilt guidance not calculated using the gyroscope or accelerometer? That would make sense to me.
This would beg the question though, you would have to assume that the surface you had the document on is also level.

I don't use it either myself, but you would be surprised when using it, you think you have the phone level but not quite, it also eats battery for breakfast so if you need it its best to use it sparingly especially when out and about.

A tip for VoiceOver users with page navigation I have just found, if you are in a multipage document you can use 3 finger swipes to the right and left to change pages rather than the page navigation buttons. However VoiceOver doesn't give any feedback for this gesture at the moment. I have reported this to knfb reader. I found this out when looking at the user guide, I haven't been able to test this with a real scanned multi page document yet, but I see no reason why this won't work in other documents apart from the user guide.

The thing that impresses me most about this ap is the speed in which scanned documents begin being spoken. Roughly about a second after snapping.

The next place this ap will amaze with is it's handling of PDF image documents. Just put one of these pesky things into Dropbox then you can oepn it in KNFB Reader and be reading it in your choice of speech or Braille output. Other aps have claimed it, but KNFB truly delivers.

How precisely do you import files from dropbox? can't find a way to allow the app access to my dropbox.
Also a thought just occurred to me, I wonder how knfb is going to be able to keep making money to fund development, as at the moment the app is a one off purchase, Obviously there will to some extent always be new people needing to buy the app, but this will lessen over time, so I just wonder how they will continue to fund development unless of course they charge for major version upgrades which I can't imagine many of us would be pleased about, I suppose the alternative might be that they charge for in app purchases for certain features, but again that wouldn't be a reliable revenue stream.

James, you seem to have a real chip on your shoulder about the accessible tech industry, we don't even know how KNFB are planning to continue to make money I just made my comment as a speculative post and you immediately jumped down KNFBS throat without any justification. Also look at it this way the company has to monetise us to some extent in order to fund development, I mean without money they can't function simple rule of business. Of course you are entitled to your opinions but I wouldn't want to see what has so far been a very sensible and constructive blog entry hijacked and turned into an accessible tech bashing entry meaning it has to be closed like the last KNFB entry.
If anyone knows how to import and export files from and to dropbox it would be very helpful to know as I can't see any options in the file explorer or settings and you would think file explorer in particular would be a sensible place for those options. what I want to do for example is upload a load of pdf or image files to dropbox and then download them into knfb reader from there.

I can confirm the issues an earlier poster experienced using KNFBReader on the iPhone 6 Plus. If you're planning on purchasing Reader on your new iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, wait until the sluggishness issues are fixed first before making a purchase.

Actually if the app reaches a certain number of downloads according to the itunes app store tos you have to build another app and charge for it. En example is tweetlist 3 vs tweetlist 4. Read the itunes app store guidelines on the apple dev site the next time you are there and you will see what I mean.

Hello Marrie,

Could you please point us to that particular guideline stating that if an app reaches so many downloads, a dev must create a new one in its place?

My understanding of why TweetList was relaunched as TweetList 4 was because of Twitter's 100,000-user limit per third-party app.

wow I didn't know that rule existed in the guidelines, to my mind that is incredibly greedy of apple, but from a purely business sense makes sense. thanks for the dropbox help, I did actually read the manual but I guess it didn't register for me that's how you import files buy using the actual dropbox app.

I am not keen on paying for updates as in app purchases, this is because I had the experience recently where my American heritage dictionary in app purchase stopped working. I really couldn't be bothered to get it fixed so I payed for the version which was a normal app purchase but that was it. I understand that KNFB could offer an in app purchase for existing customers, but to me I think I would pay for the app again just for the convenience of not having to worry about in app purchases stopping working or say knfb going out of business. Yes I know that means I would probably pay more but its about convenience. I mean if say knfb got withdrawn from the app store there go your in app purchases. Although of course if they offered an in app purchase that made upgrades cheaper that could be used buy people of course, I am just saying for me personally with an in app purchase you are relying on a lot of stuff continuing to work.
Regarding things like paying for language translation, remember they are using an off the shelf OCR engine bundled with features to make it more accessible, its quite possible there license agreement with the makers of fine reader don't allow for the offering of language support as in app purchases its an all or nothing deal.

Actually the person said that charging for an update is wrong. Twitterlist charged to upgrade to tweetlist 4. They released a new app and you had to buy it. I think it was like $3.99 Twitterrific did the same from I think it was 4 to 5, or something like that. so it only makes sence that you have to according to apple's tos.

Hi all, well I just decided to experiment with knfb readers image recognition for some jpg files I have lying around, and unfortunately my results weren't good at all.
I imported 114 images into knfb reader, and I found reader sometimes crashes when accessing the image tab in file explorer, but also it is treating each image as an individual document and there didn't seem to be any way I could get it to batch process all the images into one document.
I then tried recognising a few images and a lot of the text was out of order, some of it was rubbish etc.
I tried experimenting with both single column and multi column mode but my results still weren't great. These images were from a novel so there shouldn't have been any fancy graphics in them either. I also experienced an issue where reader would say it had finished analysing the page but then the knfb reader app would seem to vanish from my screen and all I could see is the status bar, I would have to exit and restart the app.

Contact them on twitter with your suggestions and findings. I don't have the twitter name handy right now, if someone does, can you please give it us?

Thanks.

I have already emailed them, I said I wanted to push the app to the limits, guess I managed to break it lol.

nice, I just couldn't find a way to get the app to treat it as one document, also importing 114 images from dropbox is extremely time consuming having to tap each individual image etc.

Bought the app, absolutely love it. My desk at the office is actually clean now, because I figured out what all the papers and books were simply by holding it up, without bothering to line anything up, and snapping. There are two-- count'em two--employer-purchased scanners on the desk (an OpticBook 3600 and HoverCam T5V) and K1000, but somehow using the phone is just less of an "event," so it gets done only now. Similarly, the CanoScan on my home office desk is covered in dust and the mail is... well, nevermind. I'm either very lazy or very busy. Probably very both. I found Prizmo useless, btw, though I didn't really give it a fair shake given my other options.

Very hesitant to dip a toe into the pricing discussion, but wanted to restate a point that was noted by someone on an earlier comment stream. The $100 includes (someone said) $30 to Apple, which is the part that bothers me, as well as ABBYY licensing fees and SenseTech. I'm happy about the latter two, since this is an in-depth product with some real heavy lifting involved, and I want people to make a living by producing this product for me. I must have half a dozen $10 blindness-related apps, and I think this is 10 times more involved than one of those, so the math seems to work for me. I would assume that there will indeed be upgrade costs, since the Fine reader engine updates won't come free to SenseTech and neither will the labor of improving the app--although that's the part where "modern" app developers accept that such labor was built into the asking price to begin with, so we'll see. But One could just as easily ask why Apple doesn't waive their commission on apps marketed directly to the disabled community. After all, They invest their earnings already in an accessibility team, whereas this would cost them nothing but lost profits. Their commission is not helping unknown developers in KNFB's case market their apps, nor do they ever test apps for accessibility or normally allow returns and so the commission is obviously not used for ensuring that apps work at all for blind customers the way they ensure a level of product integrity for their sighted customers. However, I suspect that Apple's waiving the commission would clash with the NFB philosophy of equal treatment. In a best-case scenario, maybe suddenly raking in a large amount of dough from blind people with this app will remind them that they need to order a pizza for the folks in the accessibility basement, because IOS8.0 suggests that they apparently need some carbs or protein down there.
At any rate, I think this is the first $100 premium-quality OCR solution, other than OmniPage. I could be wrong, but considering that each K1000 update still costs $100, it seems like progress and they'd have to sell a whole lot of copies to use economies of scale to lower the price and still keep it as their main livelihood (rather than writing a little app on the side, or a whole bunch of apps, or something involving foul-tempered fowl). On that note, though, there are other OCR apps oriented to business customers: I'd love to see KNFBReader marketed to that crowd without lowering the accessibility orientation somehow, if possible. Because I can also certainly understand the frustration of folks who feel that this risks re-stratifying access to assistive tech the way that agency or employer-purchased products like Jaws have traditionally done. I don't think this qualifies in that camp, personally, because SenseTech might be getting only $50 or whatever. If it had been easy as a business model, OmniPage or ABBYY would have had an app by now, I would think. Apologies for the ramble.

I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS APP. I'm USING AN IPHONE 6.

I'm sure KNFB weren't able to obtain a plus to test with the app so if I were them, I would've stated the release date to being out by christmas and leave it at that. That way, they would've been able to fix most if not all the issues people are having. It was I feel a pretty big mistake to release along with not only a new OS which they could've been able to beta but also a new phone that they wouldn't be able to get early access to. I understand what they were trying to do here but unfortunately with apple controlling things the way they do, KNFB were stuck. They will hopefully release a free update soon to address the issue.

just found an interesting bug, if you have the mute switch on your phone on this can prevent field of view reports being read out, it doesn't always but I found for example if I have a report being read out and I click the mute switch to on mid read of the field of view report this can cut it off. I have reported the issue to knfb. I also encountered a bug tonight where I took a photo of a document and then was stuck in the screen to view the output I couldn't back out to the main screen.

After my first use of the KNFB Reader app today, I can say, without hesitation, that it's worth every last penny. I just scanned a large stack of mail and had no issues. The layout of the buttons on the screen is intuitive. The speed of the scan is faster than expected while using an iPhone 5 running iOS 8.0.2. This app has hit the mark for me.

Unfortunately i had to erase hard drive and reinstall software today. It was nice to have app read screen to read time remaining.

how are you guys that have got it to work able to get it to read sreens? on computers? i've tried this to no avail.

I to have had this issue where you get stuck in the document screen. this seems to happen when there is no text found. voice over will say pause button and then theres no speech either from VO, or the built-in tts foice. then when you try to go back it won't let you.. I've had to restart the app to get it out. probably an ios8 bug lol

Hey Edward,
I held my phone about 12 inches from laptop screen. At an angle, not center to screen. I had flash on automatic. My computer desk next to window, so natural light might have helped. I also turned my macbook screen to brightest.