Android Question Does this seem too complex?

[Joe Byrne]

Hi. Long time coder, but totally new to Android and B4A. My mother is 95% blind and I was thinking of a program to run on an Android tablet. Basically, she'd be able to put the tablet over a document or other written text and the app would "read" the page audibly back. Kind of a mix of OCR and Text to Speech.

My question, does this sound like a program that a beginner to B4A could accomplish without investing a ton of hours to? (I have a day job with limited evening hours, maybe 4-6 hours a week max devoted to this).... and since she's 98 years old, it would have to be REALLY basic.

Thoughts? Comments? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

[canalrun]

Interesting application!

I would guess, yes. It would be possible for somebody with coding experience, but new to B4A.

There are camera libraries for displaying a full-screen preview, focusing upon button press, and then taking a snapshot.

I have seen posts mentioning OCR libraries, although I have no experience with these.

Once the OCR returns the text, there are Text to Speech libraries for B4A.

I can see the details of an application like this being tricky – how do you isolate and focus the desired text. What happens if OCR is less than 100%.

Have you searched Google Play? I bet there are free or low-cost apps that do what you want. They have probably addressed the tricky details and could probably give some ideas.

Barry.

 

[Joe Byrne]

Thanks Barry. The reason I'm looking at writing it myself is because I haven't had any luck finding such an App ... yet. Maybe I need to dig deeper I just got B4A and the rest of the dependencies installed so I figured I'd play around a bit and see how it works.

Appreciate the comments! If anyone else has done anything similar, or has any advice, I would appreciate that too!

 

[Cableguy]

you have all the necessary tools already available here in the shop (forum), time to make use of your skills!

 

[walt61]

Hi Joe,

Very nice idea and the complete solution might already exist Have a look at this post from @Johan Schoeman ('Touch a green box with yellow text when the scanner is active and it will speak out the text in the box using the Android Text-To-Speech Engine'): https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/threads/ocr-ocr-reader-complete.70659/

Good luck!