A Frabjous Day
(Note: This was formerly a friends-only post but is now public.)
For the year 1987 in my Lifetime Fic Bingo game, I have wanted to read the Man from U.N.C.L.E. novella Traitor Within the Gates by D.H. Bryn, which is one of the four hard-copy zines in my small collection. Yet, as I've discussed before, reading physical media is hard for me. This is especially true when the text is closely spaced, as that of this zine is (although it is both larger and crisper than in some zines I've seen).
Tonight I was talking about the problem with some online friends and reminiscing about a (then very expensive) program I was allowed to use in college that did optical character recognition on scanned pages and used text-to-speech to read the resulting data. I said that I'd always fantasized about having a small portable scanner in the shape of a pen that I could run across a line of text to perform this task in real time. (An Internet search later in the evening showed that such a gadget now exists.) One friend commented that cell phones might be able to perform more or less that function these days, which inspired some googling on my part. And lo, as of iOS 15 (2021), iPhones have been able to do instant OCR on any photograph taken with their cameras and then speak the text discovered. Wow! Rejoicing in Turtle Town!
I've tried this out by photographing the pages of my copy of Traitor Within the Gates, and although there is a little fiddling involved in starting each new page, it is working great. It has made the zine much more accessible for me, and it's a technology I hope to use frequently in the future. Maybe I'll even buy some more zines to use it on.
For the year 1987 in my Lifetime Fic Bingo game, I have wanted to read the Man from U.N.C.L.E. novella Traitor Within the Gates by D.H. Bryn, which is one of the four hard-copy zines in my small collection. Yet, as I've discussed before, reading physical media is hard for me. This is especially true when the text is closely spaced, as that of this zine is (although it is both larger and crisper than in some zines I've seen).
Tonight I was talking about the problem with some online friends and reminiscing about a (then very expensive) program I was allowed to use in college that did optical character recognition on scanned pages and used text-to-speech to read the resulting data. I said that I'd always fantasized about having a small portable scanner in the shape of a pen that I could run across a line of text to perform this task in real time. (An Internet search later in the evening showed that such a gadget now exists.) One friend commented that cell phones might be able to perform more or less that function these days, which inspired some googling on my part. And lo, as of iOS 15 (2021), iPhones have been able to do instant OCR on any photograph taken with their cameras and then speak the text discovered. Wow! Rejoicing in Turtle Town!
I've tried this out by photographing the pages of my copy of Traitor Within the Gates, and although there is a little fiddling involved in starting each new page, it is working great. It has made the zine much more accessible for me, and it's a technology I hope to use frequently in the future. Maybe I'll even buy some more zines to use it on.