wtm@bunker.uucp (Bill McGarry) (10/04/90)
Index Number: 10875
A Review of Three Popular Reading Systems
by Dexter (Chip) Orange
copyright (c) by Dexter Orange, 1990
About eighteen months ago I began looking for a reading
system of my own. It was extremely difficult to make comparisons
between the various systems since I had access to any particular
system only during a demonstration, and could find no one who had
significant experience with all major systems. It is the
frustration that resulted from that experience, coupled with the
fortuitous circumstance that since I made a purchase of a reading
system for use at home, I have had access to the other two major
systems here at my work place, which has lead me to write a
review of the three major contenders. The systems review here
are the Kurzweil Personal Reader, The Kurzweil Personal Reader
for the PC, and the Arkenstone Reader.
The Kurzweil Personal Reader (Model 20)
The Kurzweil Personal Reader is a self-contained, stand
alone unit. Unlike the other two readers reviewed here, it does
not require a personal computer to function. It consists of an
electronics unit about the size of a portable electric
typewriter, an optional hand scanner, and an optional flat-bed,
book-edge scanner. The hand scanner is about the size of a small
walkie-talkie, and the flat-bed scanner is about the size of a
personal computer. Each scanner connects to the electronics unit
with a cable, as does a small control pad of keys used to operate
the reader.
Unpacking and installation was a breeze; simply plug in
cables, unlock flat-bed scanner, and go. I did not have access
to the hand scanner except during a demonstration, so it may have
required a little more to set-up. The unit comes with thorough
documentation in braille, print, cassette, and video tape. The
unit also comes with several hours of training supplied by the
dealer, so learning to use the reader was also a breeze.
During the original demonstration, I found the hand scanner
difficult to operate correctly, and so did the dealer. In
general use, I have my doubts as to the usefulness of the hand
scanner, but in specific situations where the material cannot be
placed on the flat-bed scanner, or where portability is desired,
this system is the only one which will serve the purpose.
The flat-bed scanner is one custom made for Kurzweil and has
the unique feature of scanning right up to the edge of the
scanner. This, along with the sloping side (front?) of the
scanner, makes reading bound books easier than on any other
scanner. The KPR software also has an "auto-flip" feature which
allows you to place the top of the book at alternating ends of
the scanner as you change pages, thus keeping the half of the
book not being read on the sloping front of the scanner and
allowing the scanner to be pushed to the rear of your working
table or desk. The scanner has a resolution of 400 dots per inch
(the usual is 300) thus allowing for more accuracy in scanning,
especially with smaller print. The maximum page size is eight
and a half by fourteen inches, thus allowing legal sized pages to
be scanned. Of note is the fact that the scanner cannot "see"
red print. This can be annoying if you have books such as
computer manuals which make use of red print to emphasize certain
portions.
The speech output of the unit is provided by a DEC-Talk
speech synthesizer, board inside the unit, again built especially
for Kurzweil. The quality of the speech is excellent, and it has
a maximum speaking rate of 350 words per minute. I found this
rate quite fast, but a dealer tells me that for those who do not,
a newer board will soon be available with a maximum rate of 550
words per minute. In addition to providing speech for the
reader, the DEC-Talk can also be connected through the unit's
serial communications port to provide speech output for a
personal computer. In addition to providing a link to the DEC-
Talk, the serial communications port can also be used to transfer
information scanned by the reader to a personal computer, but
only in ASCII format.
The KPR can recognize a wide-variety of printed material.
The material cannot generally be hand-written, but it can be a
wide range of type styles, print fonts, and sizes. This is
similar to the other units reviewed here, but unlike them, it
cannot currently read dot-matrix material or material printed in
landscape (sideways) orientation. Kurzweil says that when the
ROM cartridge containing the 2.1 version of the software is made
available, the unit will be able to read dot-matrix print.
Actually, I have found very little need to read either dot-matrix
or landscape oriented material, but I am aware that there are
those who do need such capability. The current version of the
software being shipped with the unit is 1.1 and does have some
bugs, but generally performs well. I found it's over-all
recognition accuracy to be about the same as the Arkenstone unit;
it did better with smaller print, but was not quite as good with
numbers or punctuation characters. The PC/KPR reviewed later in
this article does have version 2.0 of the software, and did out-
perform the other two systems in recognition accuracy. The KPR
was generally the fastest at recognizing, and was the only reader
with which you could be listening to one page, while
scanning/recognizing the next. This was especially nice for
reading books since you could read continuously without a pause
between pages. Another interesting feature of the KPR (and the
PC/KPR) is the ability to "learn" the type-style being read.
This means that as more pages of the same type style are read,
the better the recognition accuracy becomes. It is this learning
which caused me to rate the KPRs better at recognition than the
Arkenstone, since on the first scan of a particular type style
they were usually about equal, but on multiple pages of the same
type, or on a second scanning of the same page, the KPRs usually
did better.
The KPR was the easiest to use of the three systems. It is
controlled through a small control pad similar to a calculator.
There are controls for reviewing the text already scanned, speech
output characteristics, transferring data to a personal computer,
and characteristics of the material being scanned. Notable for
their absence are controls for specifying whether the text is
light/normal/dark, whether it is dot-matrix or normal type,
whether it is proportionally spaced or not, and whether it is
landscape oriented or not. The other systems have such options,
and while they give more control over the scanning process, they
also make the system more difficult to use. The text review
buffer, where the scanned text is stored, will hold approximately
forty pages at once. The text review controls allow you to set
markers and go back to them later, as well as going
forward/backward by letter, word, line, paragraph, and page.
The Kurzweil Personal Reader for a PC (Model 35)
The PC/KPR is essentially the same scanning system as the
KPR, but re-designed to interface with an IBM PC/XT or
compatible. It consists of a co-processor board containing the
heart of the system, which installs inside the PC, and a flat-bed
scanner. Kurzweil offers two scanners, the low-end one being
roughly equivalent to an HP Scanjet plus, and the high-end one
being the 400 DPI book-edge scanner which comes with the KPR.
Automatic document feeders for each scanner are also available.
The system I reviewed here had the book-edge scanner. You must
provide the PC along with any necessary screen reading software
and speech synthesizer. Kurzweil does offer the DEC-Talk
synthesizer board as an option if you purchase the PC/KPR.
Unpacking and installation wasn't quiet as easy as with the
stand-alone unit, but wasn't unreasonably difficult for a
computer product requiring the installation of a board. Normally
the installation and setup are done for you by your dealer
(Kurzweil requires this of its dealers regardless of their
location), so this shouldn't be a concern. As with the stand-
alone KPR, the unit comes with the same complete documentation in
all medias and the dealer training session. It is worth noting
that both the KPR electronics unit, and the PC/KPR co-processor
arrived with defects and had to be returned under warranty.
Kurzweil paid all second-day-air shipping, and sent replacements
immediately, but this was still annoying.
Unlike the KPR, the software which performs the scanning and
recognition is loaded from disk instead of a ROM cartridge.
Disks being much easier to duplicate, Kurzweil sent me the soon-
to-be-released beta test version of the 2.0 software for this
review. It is essentially the same software as in the KPR, but
with most of the bugs fixed, and the ability to read dot-matrix
and landscape oriented material added. It also has the
additional capability of saving the scanned text in a variety of
word processing formats as well as ASCII.
The scanning software is loaded like any other MS-DOS
program. It is controlled through the PC's keyboard instead of
a separate control keypad. The software interface is extremely
easy to use with prompts to guide you through all the options.
When you scan a page, the results are displayed to the PC's
screen as they become available, but the screen reading software
must be used to do any reviewing. You have the option after each
page to save the accumulated scanned pages to a DOS file in a
variety of formats including ASCII, Word Perfect, Microsoft Word,
and many, many others. It is this capability which, in my
opinion, primarily distinguishes the PC based systems from the
stand-alone KPR. When the scanned text is saved in a word
processing format, unlike ASCII, attributes of the text such as
bolding, underlining, centering, etc. are preserved along with
the text itself. You can then exit the PC/KPR software and use
the appropriate word processor to review or edit the scanned
text.
I found the combination of the 2.0 KPR software and the 400
DPI book-edge scanner to be the most accurate of the three
systems. It has the same "learning" ability as the stand-alone
KPR which contributes to the high recognition rating. Many of
the bugs I had noted in the 1.1 version of the software had also
been fixed, and the ability to read dot-matrix and landscape
oriented material had been added. Unlike the stand-alone KPR
however, there is no capability for reading one page while
scanning/recognizing the next. Also unlike the stand-alone KPR,
both the PC version and the Arkenstone reader require the
specification of some characteristics of the text about to be
scanned. These include whether the text is dark, medium, or
light, whether it is dot-matrix or not, and whether it is
oriented normally or landscaped. These characteristics can
affect the scanning accuracy, sometimes dramatically. This means
that a particular page may need to be scanned many times,
changing the possible combinations of these options, until a good
scan is obtained.
The Arkenstone Reader (Model E)
The Arkenstone Reader is also a PC based scanning system
similar to the Kurzweil PC/KPR. It was not, however, designed as
a blind person's reading machine. It is a slight adaptation of
a commercial data-entry system called the Calera True-Scan. This
adaptation did not always seem to work out entirely well. Like
the PC/KPR, it too consists of a co-processor board, which must
be installed in a PC, and a flat-bed scanner. It requires an
IBM/AT or compatible personal computer, and again you must supply
the PC along with any screen reading software and speech
synthesizer. A variety of scanners are supported, but no book-
edge scanner is available. This makes scanning bound material
rather cumbersome. If you have the model S co-processor card
only one end of the scanner may be the "top" of the book, forcing
you to place the spine of the book on alternating sides of the
scanner as you alternate pages in the book. This can be avoided
with the model E co-processor card, but only by telling the
system between each page to rotate (or not to rotate) the image
by 180 degrees before recognizing. You must also attempt to
position the spine of the book up on the glass of the scanner
near the edge. If the spine is flexible enough, you may try
spreading the book so that both pages are on the scanner at once
(either normally for small books or in landscape orientation for
larger ones). The software can then be told to view this as a
large document with two columns, and to read the left column
first.
Only two scanners are available from Arkenstone itself: the
HP Scanjet, and the HP Scanjet Plus. These scanners are both 300
DPI, with the HP Scanjet plus having better grey-scale (256
verses 16 levels) capability. HP no longer manufactures the
Scanjet, but Arkenstone purchased a large quantity of them before
they became unavailable. The HP scanners cannot "see" yellow
print, and have a maximum page size of only eight and a half by
eleven inches.
Installation was much more difficult than the PC/KPR, made
especially so by skimpy, poor documentation. This documentation
is only available in print or on computer disk; neither braille
nor cassette versions were available. Arkenstone does not
require its dealers to install the reader, nor train a new user
in it's use if he isn't located in the same city as the dealer.
The Arkenstone dealer who sold the system reviewed here, simply
dropped it in the mail. The installation could be quite
difficult for those not experienced in such things.
The reader comes with two different software interfaces.
The original is the Calera True-Scan software. This software
allows you to control all aspects of the systems behavior,
including specifying all options. It is extremely speech
unfriendly, and I found it very difficult to use. It uses a
variety of light-bar menuing systems, arrows drawn beside
selected items, and writes directly to screen memory. In
addition to being so difficult to use, the software does not
allow you to read what you have just scanned. You must exit the
software (after having saved your reading in an ASCII or word
processing file) in order to use either a word processor or a DOS
"type" command to read the material. You must then re-enter the
True-Scan software to resume scanning.
I don't believe I was alone in my dislike of this software.
About a year after the introduction of the Arkenstone reader,
Arkenstone released a second software interface called EasyScan.
While being limited in the control you have over your options,
this software is much easier to use (still, not what I would
consider "user-friendly" however). It also allows material to be
sent to the screen as soon as the entire page has been scanned
and recognized without having to leave the software package. The
EasyScan software also comes with documentation on cassette. The
main draw-back to using the EasyScan software is that it will
save scanned material only in ASCII format, not in any word-
processing format.
Regardless of which software interface you use, the
capabilities and options of the Arkenstone system are the same.
In general, I found it to be the slowest at recognizing and the
poorest. This may be due to the use of the HP Scanjet scanner
instead of a more expensive one, but this is the scanner touted
by Arkenstone dealers when marketing the Arkenstone system as a
low-cost reading system. I did have access to an automatic
document feeder with this system, and when it was used, the
recognition was even worse. When Arkenstone was called about
this problem, they said in a round-about way that the document
feeder did not need to be sent back, everything was working about
as well as could be expected. At the time of this article, the
Arkenstone co-processor board had stopped functioning.
Arkenstone said they would pay to ship a replacement board; but
re-seating the chips on the board seemed to have solved the
problem.
If you consider buying a more expensive 400 DPI scanner to
improve accuracy, be advised that the Arkenstone will not scan a
legal sized page at that resolution; its scanning area is limited
to 10.25 inches square. The use of a 400 DPI scanner (which you
must obtain from a source other than Arkenstone) also requires a
second scanner board be installed in the PC.
The Arkenstone system does offer some options not found in
the other systems. One of these is the ability to scan a page
into a standard image file instead of attempting to recognize it
and translate it into text. This may prove useful to those
having a desk-top publishing type of application. It will also
allow you to specify a rectangle on the page to be scanned using
left, right, top, and bottom margins in inches. This may prove
more affective in yielding a clean scan than attempting to edit
out a lot of extraneous material. In addition to improving the
power of the EasyScan software, Arkenstone says it is working on
a version which will automatically recognize the orientation of
the document on the scanner and read it. The new version is also
supposed to begin speaking the text as it is recognized; no
longer making you wait for the entire page to be recognized
before beginning to speak.
Recommendations
Perhaps these general guide-lines will help you in deciding
which reading system to purchase (if any). If you're not
interested in learning how to type and how to use a personal
computer, then choose the KPR ($9,950 with book-edge scanner,
$11,950 with book-edge and hand scanner). If you do want a PC-
based system, but only have a PC/XT (not an AT) and don't want to
buy a new computer, choose the PC/KPR ($3,695 with 300 DPI
scanner, $7,495 with 400 DPI book-edge scanner). If cost is the
most important thing, choose the Arkenstone model S (which won't
read landscape oriented material) with the HP Scanjet ($2,495),
and buy a cheap AT compatible PC if necessary along with screen
reading software and synthesizer. It may not do everything, and
it may not do it the quickest (the model S is about thirty
percent slower than the model E and the Scanjet is slower than
the Scanjet Plus), but it may do enough. If you need a PC-based
system which can double as a reading system and an image scanner
for a desk-top publishing application, choose the Arkenstone
model E with HP Scanjet Plus ($3,995). If you want the absolute
best reading system, then the choice isn't quite so clear. You
could either get the PC/KPR with the book-edge scanner now (the
2.0 software should be released by the time you read this), or
get the KPR with hand scanner and flat-bed scanner and wait for
the 2.1 ROM cartridge. You may be waiting quite awhile however.
Remarks
I was extremely disappointed to hear from Kurzweil that the
KPR would not receive a ROM cartridge update at all until version
2.1 for the PC/KPR had been released. I think this really shows
a lack of support for KPR owners, especially since the reason
appears to be the cost of duplicating the ROM cartridges. This
may prove to alienate a large number of KPR customers who feel
that they have paid a premium price and are getting second-rate
support. This is a major factor in my rating the KPR lower than
the PC/KPR in both support and reliability. On the issue of
reliability, I have spoken with a representative of Kurzweil who
says that they did have a quality assurance problem in the past,
but that the entire QA section had been replaced and re-
structured in order to solve the problem. Kurzweil can be
contacted at (800) 343-0311.
Arkenstone is to be commended on its policy of offering a
thirty-day money-back guarantee. While I did not find the
support from Arkenstone and its dealer quite equal to that of
Kurzweil, this policy could go a long way towards making up for
that. Owners of an Artic screen review system should be aware
that the EasyScan manual warns of conflicts between the
Arkenstone system and the Artic software which may cause your PC
to lock-up. Using the Flipper screen review software and a
SpeakEasy speech synthesizer, I experienced no such problems.
Arkenstone can be contacted at (800) 444-4443.
The Calera True-Scan system is also marketed under a variety
of other names including the Oscar from TSI. The only difference
is that TSI provides yet another software interface which it says
is more friendly towards its other products. The Oscar's price
is $5795 for the Model E and HP Scanjet Plus.
Following is a table rating each system in a variety of
areas from poor to excellent. When two systems received the same
rating, the system I judged better is listed first.
Table of Ratings
Ease of installation:
KPR: Excellent
PC/KPR: Good
Arkenstone: Fair
Ease of use:
KPR Excellent
PC/KPR: Good
Arkenstone: Fair
General recognition:
PC/KPR: Good
KPR: Good
Arkenstone: Good
Dot-Matrix and Landscape recognition:
PC/KPR: Fair
Arkenstone: Fair
KPR: N/A
Small print recognition:
PC/KPR: Good
KPR: Good
Arkenstone: Fair
Bound material reading:
KPR: Excellent
PC/KPR: Good
Arkenstone: Fair
Speed of recognition:
KPR: Good,
PC/KPR: Good
Arkenstone: Fair
Ease of computer transfer:
PC/KPR: Excellent
Arkenstone: Fair
KPR: Poor
Quality of documentation:
KPR: Good
PC/KPR: Good
Arkenstone: Fair
Availability of documentation in special formats:
KPR: Excellent
PC/KPR: Good
Arkenstone: Poor
Reliability:
Arkenstone: Fair
PC/KPR: Fair
KPR: Fair
Support:
PC/KPR: Excellent
KPR: Good
Arkenstone: Fair
(Chip Orange is a computer systems analyst for the Public
Service Commission of Florida. He also is the creator of a
variety of computer products including the SpeakEasy speech
synthesizer (for any computer system) and the Ami-Talk screen
reading system (for the Amiga). Questions and comments can be
directed to him in print, braille, or cassette at 3227 Rain
Valley Ct., Tallahassee, FL 32308; (904) 487-2680)