New VOCR Released For Catalina

By Chi Kim, 8 October, 2019

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi All,

I'm just writing to let everyone know that I just released a new experimental VOCR.
If you haven't heard VOCR, it's an app that lets you take screenshot of your mac screen, apply OCR, navigate the result, and move the mouse. It's similar to features on JAWS and NVDA.
MacOS Catalina finally included the OCR capability in their VisionKit that take advantage of machine learning.
In my opinion, it is much faster and accurate than Tesseract that previous VOCR utilized, and you don't have to deal with terminal and third party tools.
Here's an audio demo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maBtR_6KDFs&feature=emb_title
Because the tight security in Catalina, there are multiple steps for the initial setup. You can download VOCR and read the instruction below.
https://github.com/chigkim/VOCR/
This is highly experimental, so use at own your risk!
Lastly, this kind of feature should be really built in to VoiceOver in my opinion. If you know anyone at Apple, let them know.
Enjoy,

Chi

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Comments

By Sleeping Love on Friday, November 29, 2019 - 05:47

Dear Chikim,
I would like to ask you for recommendation about VOCR installation. I want to install OCR on High-Sierra. I try to read through your manual but I don't understand and cannot find installation menu. Could you please guide me to VOCR installation on High-Sierra?
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Warmest Regards,

If you use MacOS earlier than Catalina, you have to use the old VOCR.
https://github.com/chigkim/VOCR/tree/tesseract
It requires third party tools such as Keyboard Maestro, Tesseract, ImageMagick, and you need to utilize Terminal when installing.
Since it indicates you're an App Developer, hopefully the process is not too complicated for you.
Otherwise, I'd recommend people to wait until they upgrade to Catalina and use the latest.

By slj on Thursday, October 29, 2020 - 05:47

Hi.
Wow what an amazing app. I wish I knew about this long time ago. I'm surprised that it hasn't got more attention here on the forum. I'll do what I can to spread out the information about this amazing tool.
Thanks again. I'll find this extremely useful in the future.

By Siobhan on Sunday, January 29, 2023 - 05:47

I got just enough into the install of this app to be confused. granted it's four in the morning, that might have something to do with it. I unpacked it to the app folder, started the install then got stuck trying to figure out what to do. I'll try again later.

By Mlth on Sunday, January 29, 2023 - 05:47

Hi
It still works well for me on Ventura. I did have it installed before I upgraded to Ventura though, so I'm not sure if anything has changed with the installer. Keep in mind you have to turn off screen curtain before using the app to scan a window.

Best
Malthe

By Chi Kim on Sunday, January 29, 2023 - 05:47

It should work on Ventura.
Also there's no installer. You just copy the app to application folder.
Then you just need to grant a lot of MacOs security permissions. Follow the readme carefully because if you miss one step, it won't work.