Lightweight fast Portable Scanner
Available from HumanWare
Price –expensive at approximately £1,660 $2,645
Manufacturers Website http://www.abisee.com/html/products_eyepal1.htm
Bottom Line – Awesome kit let down by buggy and restricted software but even so I could not cope without it now.
When I started my PhD I realised that I needed to do serious amounts of reading and I also realised that my previous scanning method would be too expensive in the long run. Whilst doing my Masters I use a Canon DR 2580 duplex document scanner. This was a fantastic scanner but the drawback was that each book had to have all its pages ripped out before scanning. When you are studying law this means that a lot of pages need to be ripped or cut from books. More importantly it meant I needed to buy every book I scanned. Some Law books cost over £100 so a category of books were excluded from me. For my PHD this simply was not a feasible solution. Ordinary flat bed scanning was also ruled out because of the time involved in manual scanning of pages.
Luckily an amazing development in scanning technology has arrived just in time. The EyePal has revolutionised my access to books. I managed to get funding for the scanner but I think I would have somehow had to buy it anyway if I did not get funding.
The Eye-Pal is probably unlike any other scanner you have seen. It only weighs one-pound and is a completely portable USB device that is faster than a flatbed scanner. It is basically a camera on a tripod which sits over books that you place under it.
When you get the EyePal you will find that the camera is in a vertical position flush with the tripod holding it. The first step is to lift the camera arm into a horizontal position where it clicks into the top of the tripod. The next step is to fold down the tripod legs and swivel a couple of locking catches.
The assembled Eye-Pal therefore has two horizontal legs forming an l-shape on the table. A vertical tripod pole rises at the junction of the l arms. The camera is then projected horizontally out from the vertical pole, aiming downwards onto the book you want to scan. So it can take pictures of the area between the l shaped arms. This is actually quite a clever system as it means that you will always know the field limits of the camera. As long as the book you are scanning is within the l shaped legs you can be sure that the camera is picking up the entire book. This means that even if you have no sight you can assess the area of book scanning. Once you are used to the foldable stand assembling will take less than a minute. The camera requires no adjustments and has no controls. The camera automatically adjusts to the text to be scanned and requires no positioning.
The really odd presentation of the Eye-Pal is that it is provided with a draw-string cloth bag as its so called case. This provides absolutely no protection for the Eye-Pal whilst travelling. This is very odd for an expensive device which is clearly designed to be portable and taken to libraries. I have taken the step of buying bubble wrap to pack into the bag to increase protection.
Before attaching the EyePal to your PC you need to run the installation disk on the cd provided with the kit. This will install the necessary drivers and the EyePal software. The Eye-Pal software needs at least a 1.4 GHz Pentium or equivalent AMD processor. The manufactures say it needs 512 MB RAM Memory but 1GB is recommended. I installed the software on a netbook and a desktop, both of which have 2 GB. You also need 450 MB free on your Hard Drive.
You also need a High Speed USB 2.0 port . The manufactures strongly recommend XP but say the product will work under Vista. I have only used it under XP.
The EyePal software badly needs to be updated and does not match the high quality of the kit. Initially after installation I was very disappointed. Any attempt to open the user manual from within the EyePal application caused a crash. Luckily the manuals are available in doc format on the supplied CD. The other major initial stumbling block was that initially the Camera simply did not work with the software. I eventually discovered, by trial and error, after looking through the advance options that un-checking the box which provided support for USB 1 allowed the camera to function.
Opening the Eye-Pal application reveals a simple interface dominated by an immediate image of whatever is placed under the camera. Pressing the space bar will start the reading of what ever is on the page. This is impressive and is apparently appears almost magical to sighted people looking on. This initial promising start is soon replaced by some annoyances though.
The learning curve on the EyePal software is unnecessarily complicated. Too many functions can only b accessed by keyboard short cuts. Turning on the camera light is controlled, for example, by pressing control L but you will not be able to find a similar command in the menu system. The most serious shortcoming in the software is that the menu option to perform a conversion to a text file on individual pages does not work at all. For some reason the OCR here introduces regular spaces in the middle of words. This can be got around by using a keystroke to automatically create a text file of the page. The fact that the keystroke works but the menu option does not is odd. The OCR in book scanning mode is fine. The other main annoyance is that the EyePal takes an inordinate amount of time to convert books into text files to be read by third party software. This is again very puzzling as the EyePal produces speech instantly from the graphical scans it produces. I have been assured that many of these problems will be resolved in future releases of the software. I look forward to this as there are several other annoyances here.
Still when all is said and done the Eye-Pal is still an awesome piece of kit in operation. The EyePal can work in single page or book mode. In single page mode you simply place a page under the camera, press space and the page will start to be read out almost instantly from the picture of the page which is loaded on your screen. This is very impressive in operation. However I use the software almost exclusively in book mode. In this mode a dialogue box invites you to scan single or 2 pages at once. There is also a useful option to scan odd and even pages which the software can intelligently sort together. There is even an automatic function which uses a motion detector to initiate a new scan after you have turned a page. The motion detector can scan 20 pages per minute in a bound book. Just turn a page in your book and wait for the shutter sound. After you hear the shutter sound, turn the page again.
In practice I found it quicker to initiate the scan manually though by pressing the space bar on each page.
The EyePal scans pages into a proprietary graphical format called a Zoom book. This is based on .jpg images of each of the pages you scan. Reading is intelligent and immediate on the loading of these pages which is very impressive. This makes it all the more strange that if you want to convert a zoom book to text it will take on average 20 seconds a page to do this. As I work mainly with text files this is a nuisance. The other draw back is that if you want to edit and proof read documents you have to do this in text files as Zoom books are not editable. What I do in practice is go to the British Library, scan my book in Zoom book format and then wait until I return home to initiate the text conversion software. The EyePal software can operate independently of the scanner so you can read previously scanned Zoom books without having to be physically attached to the scanner.
There are lots of bugs and annoyances which probably are the result of the comparative newness of the product. The scanner software rarely survives a visit to the library without a crash. Make sure that you save chapters rather than whole books to minimise the affects of any crash. I have also from experience learnt work around to avoid the annoying features of most of the bugs.
The scanner is fast, very fast. The claim that it can scan 20 pages a minute is conservative. In practice I think it is faster than this as the scanner can accept a 2 page scan. In reality then I found it is performing with books at about 30 pages a minute. It would be even faster but at the moment the software is completely intolerant of any 2 page scan where there is white space on either of the pages. This might appear at the end of a chapter, for example, where the text finishes halfway down the page. If you try to scan here you will get an error beep. In practice you have to switch to single page scanning to get these pages scanned. To do this you will need a spare blank piece of paper to hide one half of the open book at a time. This is the only way single page scanning will work in book mode.
. Despite all the software annoyances this kit has revolutionised access to books for me. Providing I can get to a library I can read anything in it. For the first time in history I believe that blind readers can achieve a measure of equality with sighted readers in libraries. The British Library love the kit as it is so low impact on the books. There is no need to press books against any scanner glass.
The OCR performance is pretty good though the software either performs well or outputs gibberish. There seems no in between state. A slight oddity of the OCR is that it sometimes confuses E with C. I have learnt to routinely do a find and replace on all scanned documents and forced a replacements of all instances of arc with are, and also wc with we. If there are any words which are difficult to comprehend try replacing any c in the word with e and the word will often become clear. Despite this the OCR compares favourably with other packages and I would certainly place it above, for example, Kurzweil.
The OCR delivers text files with line layout maintained by the provision of a hard space at the end of every line. This in practice has been useful as the regularity of this format has allowed me to do find and replace to join together hyphenated words.
Another nice feature of the OCR is that it inserts a formatted line giving the page number at the start of every page. Not all OCR packages pick up on page numbers and this has proved very useful for referencing.
You can only use the OCR that comes with the EyePal and there is no option to use 3rd party OCR engines. There is no way that I could find to get the EyePal scanner recognised in other Scanning solutions such as the Microsoft document Scanner. So you are stuck with the buggy EyePal interface which will hopefully be improved soon.
The EyePal is very expensive. If it was a quarter of the cost I would not hesitate to recommend it as indispensable for visually impaired people. Whether it is in fact indispensable depends on the amount of reading you need to do. This is a serious device for serious readers. In theory we should all be able to go to a library and get books in accessible formats. In reality this is not the world we live in. The Eye-Pal delivers a measure of independence for visually impaired readers. For maximum efficiency I found that the most effective scanning is still with the assistance of a support worker. The system I use is to ask a support worker to place the book under the scanner and turn the pages. Whilst she is doing this I operate the EyePal software on my netbook. This is much faster than trying to do this myself because of the need to respond to problems where the EyePal cannot scan in 2 page mode.
If the EyePal is to be truly independent in use for a visually impaired person the present intolerance of the scanner for some pages whilst in 2 page scanning mode needs to be overcome.
It is difficult not to conclude that the EyePal represents the future of scanning, not only for visually impaired users but the wider world. After watching me use the device I know the British Library are considering it as an option for a low impact solution to scanning and photocopying. Anything which protects books from damage is of interest to libraries.
Hopefully the price will come down. I know that I could not work without it now.
David Griffith
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
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