Hello Applevis!
As a certain youtuber would say, I hope you're all having a lovely day :)
I am on sequoia rc, I literally have 0 idea whether or not this would work the same way on previous versions although I'd tend to think so.
So basically in college we were working and I was in team with someone who handed out the final copy written on paper to the teacher. For the sake of not losing any class related material, I asked him to send me the photo of what we'd done together.
So I received 2 jpeg. I just download them, thinking that I will do proper OCR on my windows laptop because it's just easier there. To organize it better I create one pdf with both files thanks to Finder actions. Then I open it in Preview, thinking I'll just do vo shift l, just to have an idea of which page is which.
I was then so shocked to discover that not only it'd done OCR, so each pages had text readable with Voiceover, but it had even kept some of the formatting along. So I had 2 pages, with readable text, 1 table per page, where rows and columns were 90% accurate, readable and sorted as they were written.
Now, I know that openbook from freedom scientific is a real scam, but at this extent?
Good luck of doing all that in windows, offline, with first party apps, in less than 30s.
Apple, you've done an incredible job on this one, thank you!
Comments
Mac OCR
That sounds fantastic. Any idea if it's just a feature of Preview or if it's system wide?
I only recently discovered VO+Shift+L which is occasionally handy for simple OCR but that's the only way I know how to get it to do anything similar.
I remember a few years ago, there was a new MacOs feature that allowed you to literally copy text out of an image using the mouse. I could see then and it was quite magical, although I only ever really used it on a screenshot from a web page telling me about the feature and I never figured out how to do something similar with VoiceOver.
Preview and Pdfs with Voiceover
Apple did a great job with preview in Mac OS Sequoia. Sequoia resolves the issue of reading Pdfs on Mac, now I can read any pdf on mac very easy. I didn't know the ocr feature, is it only availeable on english?
I experience the same
I agree, it's so easy with macOS Sequoia to read PDFs with VoiceOver. In July my Mac was broken for two and a half weeks, and already there working with my old Windows laptop was a real fight. So easy things became so difficult!
Not sure if it was like that…
Not sure if it was like that before but even in the print window we have ocr automatically performed on the pdf preview of what will be printed out. The printing experience on the mac is way better than windows by the way, no need to add a printer on the network it automatically appears in the printers list unlike windows.
Woah!
That's amazing! I didn't think the Apple image description feature was very useful based on my experience with Big Sur, but maybe it's significantly improved? How has PDF support improved? Does VoiceOver properly navigate links, headings, tables, lists, etc with the standard VO navigation commands and the rotor? I thought High Sierra made some significant improvements, but there were still bugs where it wouldn't jump to elements you thought it should, so I'm curious just how much of a big deal Sequoia really is.
No it's only inside pdf…
No it's only inside pdf viewer and not with vo shift l, re read what I wrote.
A pleasant surprise in MAC OS 15
Yesterday I happen to save a screen shot. I reviewed the screen shot in the preview app, I pressed VO plus L to understand about the image, but it did not give me enough information. I accidently interacted with the image and was in for a pleasant surprise!!!!! Voice over read the content of the image and I was able to move through line by line and read it.
I was unsure whether the voice over read the text in the screen shot or the content of the window from where I took the screen shot. I tried with another screen shot the same process, Yahoo !!!! it again worked perfectly. I think it is one of the unsung feature of voice over in MAC OS 15.
Yeah in quicktime too. When…
Yeah in quicktime too. When you screen record something you can brows through text displayed with standard voiceouer commands in quicktime. I'm really curious whether this would work for other regular video as well or not. I am not sure if it's voiceover or some ocr engine pushed and built-in systemwide but it works and works great.
Amazing
I just tried this in a medical document which I downloaded a few weeks ago from my local healthcare provider's website. They have done an excellent job in the first place at least where VoiceOver is concerned, but VO-Shift-L does indeed seem to work in .pdf documents now. You go Apple!
I never said vo-shift-l is…
I never said vo-shift-l is the trigger for ocr (which is not the case for me). In any case maybe cause of the update to RC I am not able to reproduce any of what I described in this thread. I think there is a way to force ocr from Preview but I can't remember it.
I think it's really…
I think it's really systemwide ocr, not related to voiceover at all.