OCR Software and Subscription Plans

General
1

I’m disabled and rely on text-to-speech for reading. I’m looking for OCR software and tried FoxIt, which I like, but the $129.99 annual fee is too much for me. A one-time payment would be more manageable.

I don’t need features like cloud storage or AI spelling and grammar checks, which I find unreliable. Abbyy FineReader is another option, but it also has a yearly subscription.

So, here are my questions:

  1. Can anyone recommend a good OCR software?
  2. Why is everything on a subscription model now? I’d prefer a one-time purchase and an option to upgrade later. I get that companies need to make money and keep updating their software, but nearly $11 a month is steep.

Do these programs really need to connect to a server to run OCR? I’m using a USB scanner and don’t understand why software can’t work like that too.

2

I know PDF-X is a one-time purchase and it has decent OCR, but I’m not sure if it’s exactly what you need. They do offer a free limited trial, so you can give it a try and see if it works for you.

3

Edge has a built-in screen reader for webpages and PDFs. It’s free but only works in the browser.

I’m guessing you need a screen reader to access everything on your screen, right?

4

I don’t need the entire screen.

I have a screen reader for FireFox, but screen readers can only read pdfs that have text data. Many pdfs are just the image. So I use OCR to create that missing data.

5

I know an open-source project that might be useful in this case… github. screen saver… hope this is a step closer to what you need

6

I made a small program that uses OCR to make text in PDFs selectable, so you can read it with any text-to-speech PDF reader. It can also extract text from screenshots. It’s not super disability-friendly, though, so I’m not sure if it’ll help. If you’re interested, just let me know.

It uses Tesseract as the OCR engine and only works on Windows.

7

I totally agree. It’s pretty frustrating that software companies charge so much, especially for people who need it the most. They could definitely offer a one-time fee and then just charge for updates if you want them.

8

totally, I even considered paying month by month. I could have a caregiver read my mail, hospital paperwork, and other stuff to me, then scan, OCR, and sort it a few times a year. But that’s just ridiculous! It would be invasive, take longer than text-to-speech, and it’s not even an option.

9

On iPhone and iPad, when you take a photo of a document and view it in the Photos app, it has built-in OCR. You can copy or extract the text directly from there…