What's Going on with Digit-Eyes?

Digit-eyes is done. There's an app called Lenz, or something like that that does something like digit-eyes. There's an article that talks about it on the AFB access world from jan 2017. It was something about appliance usability with touch panels.

Hello,
Is there a link for this Lenz ap? And that's a shame about digit eyes.

Hi,
I don't have the link, but if you look for this article in the AFB access world and type in appliance you should see an article titled something lenz and halos, making touch screen appliances more accessible. It's probably not the exact wording of the thingy, but you should find it in the access world site.

It's VizWiz that was shut down, not Digit-Eyes. Here's a link to the AFB Accessworld article: http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw180104&utm_source=AFB&utm_medium=email

I remember viswis being shut down I think it was way back in 2014 or something like that.. also what does that app have to do wiht scanning bar codes and touch screens. They are not in my humble opinion releated.

Hello Maria and Justin,

Today I have received an email from Nancy Miracle which is behind the DigitEyes. Below are some of the quotes that was in that email that I wanted to share with you and our users.

"It is absolutely untrue that we have close"

"On the contrary, we have been expanding our data acquisition operations and we now have over 75 million items in our database for our users — and we add about 150,00 records per day. Please assure everyone that the rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated..."

So, the assumption that DigitEyes have closed was greatly exaggerated as Michael Hanson mentioned above of the article that was mention. After reading that article DigitEyes wasn't even mentioned in that article at all. So, it is great to hear that DigitEyes is still around and have expanded their database to make this a great app to have on hand. I highly recommend it for anybody that is in a need for an app like this.

Hmm, I get it now.
I'm on the wrong page, lol! Anyway, thats great they are still running and expanding.

I hope theoriginal poster can print out their labels like they wanted to do. Good luck.

Hello all,
Forgive me if I'm wrong but Maria suggested in her post that she had tried to contact Nancy Miricle by phone and e-mail with no success. I have seen some posts by Nancy in the parst concerning Digit Eyes but nothing recently and nothing in this thred.
Don't you think that for marketing purposes and for the good name of Digit Eyes it would have been by far the best for Nancy to respondon this forum? After all, as her product is exclusively for users of applevis I believe it would have been much better to squash the rumours here rather than going to one of the applevis team to spread the news.
We see too often apps that are specifically built for blind and partially sighted people of which they become reliant on and cost money either being dropped (Viz Wiz), badly maintained (Money Reader) or appear to have lost any way of contacting the developer (Digit Eyes). Sometimes it appears to me that developers just don't care.

Steve.

Hello Steven,

Yes, to give Marie some credit. As you have mentioned the original question was that she was not able to successfully get a hold of the DigitEyes folks. I will personally send Nancy an email to this post so that she can answer this for herself. I completely agree and understand not only frustrating that the developers are not responding back but also make you wonder if they were even still around.

Now, as for giving Nancy some credit for DigitEyes. She has just posted a comment on the DigitEyes app entry page in the past two days. So, she is around. Plus, their last release for DigitEyes was made for iOS 10. So as for them not caring I totally disagree with. Again, I'll let Nancy respond to this post for herself as I am very certain that they do care and that there had to be some mix up in why Marie did not get the response.

Lastly, I had personally reached out to Nancy on my own. I had mentioned that some people thought they may have closed. I wanted to personally find out if this was true or not. So, when I got her response I took the time and post it here on this thread mostly because I wanted to put this little fire out before this was not spread like wildfire outside of AppleVis that they have closed. She had no idea that this post even existed. As I can be quite certain that not all developers come to AppleVis on a regular basis as they don't always get specific questions to their own app.

But, thank you for standing up to Marie and I'm glad you did but I also can also stand in defense for the both side of the party. So here is for hoping that DigitEyes and Marie will be able to resolve this problem. :)

Hello AnonyMouse,
A very considered response and one that I am prepared to accept in the case of Nancy Miricle. I agree that Digit Eyes is a brilliant app and one I use all the time in my attempts to tell the difference between, for example, tomato soup and baked beans! As a UK resident, I believe that Digit Eyes is the only available IOS OCR scanner for us Brit's who are blind and I thank her for that. However, this thred does show how vunrable we are as a community when it comes to developers.
I am particularly minded of the Money Reader app (or whatever it is called now) which was very useful in telling the difference between British banknotes that were very close in size, for example, the £5 and £10 notes. There is nothing else on the market for us Brit's and now we have a new plastic £5 note with similar constructed £10 and £20 notes coming soon, I'm not sure what the solution actually is. A similar problem has faced people living in Scotland and Australia and who knows, in other countries too.
Whatever I do (put messages on this forum for example) I cannot contact the new developers of the Money Reader app to see if they are still there or have plans to update/add these new banknotes. I have done an extensive search and apart from a local US telephone number (which I do not understand) there are no other contact details available such as e-mail or social media links. Therefore, I am left with the hope that something will be done... and this app was quite expensive when I first purchased it with the expectation that I would be able to use it for many years and that it would be updated periodically (I am of the belief that developers must have to be responsible if they charge for their apps). I'm afraid that those of us from other countries have to rely on those of you in the US to help us out with putting pressure on developers as most of the apps on this site are developed in the US and you have the easiest opportunity to put pressure on them.

Sorry for the rant...

Steve.

Ok, I'm bumping this topic to the top. Lol. Anyway, any word from digit eyes on the original poster's issue with the labels and not hearing anything back from the digit eyes creator about what ever is going on? I don't use the product anymore myself, however just wondering since we've heard nothin about what might or might not be going on. I really hope we hear about how to resolve the issue(s) if any of us come in contact with the same issue(s) in question here.nothin

Hello Lincoln6,
I guess from your name you are in the lovely city of Lincoln, I travel through there quite often on my way to York to see my son at university!
Thank you, I'll give Tap-Tap-See a go and 'see' if it works. I've got the app but never tried it out with UK banknotes.
However, it's still a shame that apps that are created to fulfil particular issues faced by blind an partially sighted people are not regularly updated. With apps such as Money Reader this could be quite dangerous for those who try to identify a note and when having the old £20 note get £5 instead. For example, Money Reader is currently mistaking the old £20 for the new £5 note.

Steve.

Oy wow, well, I hope you can resolve the issue. Im guessing you already tried uninstalling and reinstalling the app etc etc etc?

Hello Marie,

Please check your email as I have sent you the address that I used to contact the DigitEyes folks. Here is for hoping that they get your problem resolved.

Good Luck!

Digit-Eyes, as AnonyMouse relayed, is very much alive and well.

As a matter of fact, we are adding roughly 1 million new UPC's per week (world wide) to our database so that our users can identify their stuff. And, as noted above, a lot of these are from sources outside the US and in languages other than English (Digit-Eyes works in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, German and Polish). And we have quite a lot of information in Dutch and Finnish now, as well.

We recently did have a problem with the Google module that we are using to create the QR codes for people who make labels. After some unsuccessful discussion with them, we ended up refactoring the code and as of last night, the feature is working -- albeit somewhat more slowly that it used to. But you should be able to make labels whenever you wish. I've written to everyone who sent an email to support and let them know that it is now working.

On March 9, AT&T, our voice carrier, changed their voicemail system and it sounds like Maria may have tried to phone before we got the new system set up correctly. It is working fine now and anyone who wants to phone is more than welcome to. Please note that we do keep more-or-less standard business hours of roughly 8 am to 5 pm US central time.

AnonyMouse reached me by the simple expedient of sending email to support@digit-eyes.com. I'm also available as nmiracle@gmail.com should anyone wish to use that instead.

Developers are pretty much like any other business -- they have to pay rent, compensate their staff, etc. And to do this, they have to make a profit. Which can be difficult.

For instance, when we sell the Digit-Eyes UPC software for $5.99, Apple's commission is a third of that, leaving us with $3.99 of the purchase price to provide lifetime server, code and email and/or telephone support to each of our users.

Another reason that companies change may be that their technology proves desirable to another company.:

One of the good image recognizers, oMoby, was powered by IQEngines. It was a derivative of a project at UC Davis and they ended up getting acquired by Yahoo! because of their image recognition technology: https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/23/yahoo-acquires-image-recognition-startup-iq-engines/

LookTel (who made an excellent money recognizer, which is what I believe you are referring to was acquired by NantWorks LLC http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-tribune-publishing-rejects-gannett-0524-biz-20160523-story.html Their website is still active, so you might want to contact them through it if you have issues: http://www.looktel.com/ I am, however, not sure it is current because it mentions the iPhone 3GS and the 4th generation iPod, rather than current devices.