I'm fooling around with print maps again, and this time I printed out a map after flipping it in the Photos app, then inserting it into a Pages document to make a mirrored image. This is so I can get a sighted person to trace the lines of the map with a ballpoint pin on a drawing board to make it tactile. It has names and numbers on it, but I only care about the lines at this time.
Voice over recognizes the image, both in Photos and Pages, as a map and tries to read a bunch of gibberish, I assume because it is backwards.
I checked the printout with Seeing AI, mostly to be sure it actually printed something, and in the Read mode, it reads a bunch of gibberish. However in the describe mode it seems to figure out what the backward letters and numbers are, like the title of the map. I ended up asking it if the letters are backward, and it said they were, speculating that the map was printed as a mirror image, or some sort of verbiage like that.
By OldBear, 22 April, 2025
Forum
iOS and iPadOS
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Similar experience
I put on a t-shirt this morning and wondered which one it was. So I put on my Meta glasses, stood in front of a mirror, and asked Meta to describe the shirt. The shirt had text that Meta couldn't make out, even after I explained we were looking into a mirror and the image was reversed.
Be My Eyes with the AI option? No problem. It told me this was a man taking a selfie in a mirror, and then correctly read the text on my t-shirt. Good work, BME.
interesting results
Hi OldBear and Paul,
Interesting BeMyAI reads this sort of thing and the others didn't. Thanks for the analysis. It's good to learn about these models' different limitations and capabilities.
Mirror
Seeing AI didn't say the map was mirrored until I asked. I'm not sure if I should have expected it to, but that would probably be useful. Apparently, though, it doesn't have any problem with reading that way. It told me as much information as with the original map printout. It was a State with counties.
When I fed the original image directly into Seeing AI from a PDF, it even gave me directional relationships between the counties.