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?