After much anticipation, the KNFBReader app for iOS finally landed in the iTunes App Store today.
Having been the subject of much speculation, blind users will now finally have the opportunity to see if is has been worth both the wait and its $99 asking price.
From looking at the feature list, it is already quite clear that KNFBReader is likely to take OCR on iOS devices somewhere it hasn’t previously been. It is packed full of features, all of which are designed to help blind uses get the best possible result when scanning documents.
The KNFBReader app allows users to capture pictures of virtually any type of printed text, including mail, receipts, class handouts, memos and many other documents that you may encounter. It also offers support for both single and multiple page documents.
Once an image of a document has been captured, KNFBReader recognises the words and reads them aloud to the user with text-to-speech and Braille access.
Michael Hansen has recorded an in-depth walk-through and demonstration of the app, which should help give some idea of whether you think it will be worth $99 of your money (as we had been led to expect, there is no trial or lite version of this app available).
KNFBReader is optimized for use on the iPhone 5s, although it also cites compatibility with the iPhone 5 and 5c. It requires iOS 7 or later.
If you’ve downloaded this app, we would love to hear your comments on its performance.
Comments
I am using a case just fine
I use my 5S in a typical plastic case and it works fine. I don't get access to tilt assist but I just use field of views now and again and that suits my working method with the reader.
How does having a phone in a
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.
I have no idea
I don't have any issue with vibrations in general on the phone, could care less about tilt assist though, not something I really care about using anyway.
My thery is this. Maybe the
My thery is this. Maybe the case will block part of th camera so tilt assist can't work as well?
Take care.
Perhaps
I doubt it as recognition is fine, done many things with the reader and all is working. As I said, don't need it, seems a bit of a gimmick anyway
tilt guidance
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.
You are correct
I got it to work in the end, vibration settings weren't set properly. I tried it, turned it off myself as it's very irritating and blind. It's easy enough just using field of view reports and aiming that way for me.
I don't use it either myself,
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
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.
KNFB Reader performance
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
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.
They have had £70 off us
They can charge for major new features I suppose but this idea that blind companies can keep charging and charging to suit themselves constantly has to go. We're on the iPhones now, different culture, different mindset. I will be disappointed if they charge us constantly for minor feature revisions. They could have made a fortune from educational establishments if they did this thing called marketing right, you know, buzz and all that.
James, you seem to have a
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.
Tough, my opinion stands!
I am really quite disappointed that we, as blind people, suddenly want to offer incentives to the AT industry to keep chacing us for money. I understand your point that they need to fund development, but surely you must realise that we are not an infinite resource to be taken for granted. The company has already charged a significant amount for the app as it is, expecting people to keep paying and paying for minor revisions is seriously pathetic in 2014. We are just blind, not made of money.
As to dropbox, read the manual. Use the dropbox app and open from within that. Easy enough
iPhone 6 Plus
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.
More thoughts on how KNFB *could* have made money
Some of the application could easily have been charged for depending on language version. I personally don't care for language translation, so charge for that. I only read English text so charge for the scanning engine to use different languages. It's really easy with some planning. The other thing to consider is what else can they actually charge the user for outside of what we already have? The upgrade would have to be really significant to make us pay again. As I said in the other post, we are in a different landscape now, there are other solutions out there that aren't as good but are reasonable enough for some folks. Good will is hard to get back.
i don't own knfb but this
i don't own knfb but this works everyware.
*select the pdf you want timport from your db (dropbox) * click share * click open with or open in * click knfb reader
I really hope this works.
Actually if the app reaches a
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.
That's what I did for email sharing
That's the solution I use yes.
Huh?
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.
I think we would be a long way from that
I suspect it will take a considerable time before that became an issue with the iTunes app store. Even if they did submit a different app, surely it must be possible to know who has purchased it via the ID or something like that. It's not hard to solve surely?
wow I didn't know that rule
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.
Even if the rule exists, it doesn't matter
The Appstore knows you have paid for it once, I doubt they will make people pay again and again. That's not business sense and not really likely if I am honest.
After looking at the manual, you're right Alex, it's not as clear as it should be. I just have been so used to importing to Voice dream and the other apps I suppose, the steps past me by.
It does suggest they might charge for future enhancements
On the FAQ page found at:
http://www.knfbreader.com/FAQ-en.html
"Will I need to pay for software upgrades?
At this time, software updates will be free unless the updates include major functionality or enhancements."
As I said, the enhancements would have to be substantive to charge that kind of price again, either that or have the update as in app purchases at a reduced price.
KNFB reader
hi all, I too have purchased KNFB reader, and all I have to say is, wow. absolutely fantastic job all the way round. I feel like a kid in a candy store, I can't wait for my mail to come so i can read it on the go. fantastic app, and yes, it really has changed our lives for the better. if you guys also would like to hear a new podcast about technology which I am going to be on in a couple of months time, look for new tech city in your favorite podcasting client such as podcast, or downcast.
I am not keen on paying for
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.
Surely the AppleID would be good enough
As I said, charging £70 or $99 any chance they feel like it isn't going to work in today's market. We are in an age now where we have choices. Surely, the AppleID would know if you had paid for an app or not so it's surely possible to discount it for existing owners. I've not actually confirmed this as possible though but it seems logical.
Charging for software updates?
Okay, no ap in the ap store that I have used, has charged for updates! The hole idea that someone should charge for updates to an ap is repulsive. That would be like apple charging for people to have VoiceOver, NOt IOS, but Voiceover to be updated. I don't even know if the ap store allows for such a format. You perchase an ap once, all upgrades are free so long as you have perchased the ap. Keep it simple KNFB, and stop acting like freedom scientific.
They're not charging.
Hey. People are just saying they might charge not that they would.
I've tried the app and find it to be good. But I think the price is to high. And honestly I would not pay for in app features since there's not any I can think of.
It's a nice app but I really don't like when it reads junk text. I'm thinking of buying a stand for the I Phone, what do you guys think. Does it make a difference?
I tried scanning my toothpaste and it read a little to me, but then started reading junk text. So I changed the setting for motiple colum mode and it read even worse. I think a nice feature in an update would be that it would switch modes for you after taking the picture. I mean we don't know if things have multiple collemns or any collemns at all. What if it's just a book? There's no collemns in in a book are there?
You can restore yoru purchase
You can restore yoru purchase but zccording t othe itunes tos you cannot discount due to an apple id. It is against their rules. whcih is good of corse, as apple gets thier 30 percent. so paying for an upgrade woudl be nice.
Actually I think what twitterrific did was had you authoenticate and if you had the update it would not charge you but that's because not enough of the verion has been sold to charge for another app. Remember that apple needs their 30 perent so if knfb or another other company wants to charge let them. I'd gladly pay $99 when I have it now that I"m seeing the benifits of this app. I might do that before I go in for my masters program in a few years time.
Rock on apple. they do things right.
colomns
Actually ther are colomns in a book. I know text books that have 2 colomns of text to fit more ona page.
apple charging for updates
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
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
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 have already emailed them, I said I wanted to push the app to the limits, guess I managed to break it lol.
Doubt you broke it
I did scan 218 pages of a image based PDF and it worked alright for me.
nice, I just couldn't find a
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.
Can imagine
I didn't use images myself, it was one of those scanned PDF user manuals for a bit of kit I used to use back in the day. It worked well enough to export the text to VoiceDream and listen within that. Not sure what to suggest for your case though.
Pricing and Such
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.
KNFB READER
I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS APP. I'm USING AN IPHONE 6.
Iphone 5
Yes, I use it on an Iphone 5, and it works perfectly.
Regarding working on the plus
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
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.
KNFB APP IS ALL THAT I HOPED IT WOULD BE AND MORE
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.
Re: KNFB Reader on iPhone 5
I only got to try it a few times on the iPhone 5 before my iPhone 6+ arrived, but when it worked, I could find out what the piece of mail was that I was scanning. On my new phone, the screen is unresponsive most of the time. Really disappointed.
Lifesaver Today!
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 able?
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.
not backing out issue.
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
KNFB reader.
Hi.
What you need to do for that is, tap on the pause button and it should say no text found then go back on its own. As for books this app wasn't really designed for books it's more for letters, leaflets and menus. It can read boxes and other things like that and I guess if you wanted to try a book you could, but it would be way to long for me and i don't have the time or pations to do it.
Reading Computer Screen!
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.