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Updates in OCR software
Apr. 20th, 2017 07:29 pmSo this is something I found as I was going through old LJ entries and deleting things.
From Nov. 2007: Plz die in a fire, k thx.
( Or, I hate modernist poetry now and it's all your fault, William Carlos Williams )
The context for the original post is that I was working in disability services attempting to convert poetry with extremely fiddly formatting. I was remembering the William Carlos Williams and how much I had hated it recently (though not this poem) because I am once again working for disability services and had to convert a speech by John Cage, the modernist composer.
He had written a talk, which was formatted in four columns, each with two or three words. In an introduction, he explained that each line was meant to be one second long and that the large gaps between blocks of text (in some cases an entire blank column) was so music could be played in between the different bits of the talk.
Two things made this less annoying than the William Carlos Williams.
1) As you may have noticed, Cage explained what the purpose of the formatting was.
2) OCR technology has sufficiently advanced so that I didn't have to manually put in all of the spaces -- the software placed the words in more or less the correct places on the page, thus preserving the formatting.
As the student for whom I was converting this has low rather than no vision, they could see the gaps as they were following along while their screen reader read the text to them. Perhaps the screen reader even took one second to read each line as was intended.
From Nov. 2007: Plz die in a fire, k thx.
( Or, I hate modernist poetry now and it's all your fault, William Carlos Williams )
The context for the original post is that I was working in disability services attempting to convert poetry with extremely fiddly formatting. I was remembering the William Carlos Williams and how much I had hated it recently (though not this poem) because I am once again working for disability services and had to convert a speech by John Cage, the modernist composer.
He had written a talk, which was formatted in four columns, each with two or three words. In an introduction, he explained that each line was meant to be one second long and that the large gaps between blocks of text (in some cases an entire blank column) was so music could be played in between the different bits of the talk.
Two things made this less annoying than the William Carlos Williams.
1) As you may have noticed, Cage explained what the purpose of the formatting was.
2) OCR technology has sufficiently advanced so that I didn't have to manually put in all of the spaces -- the software placed the words in more or less the correct places on the page, thus preserving the formatting.
As the student for whom I was converting this has low rather than no vision, they could see the gaps as they were following along while their screen reader read the text to them. Perhaps the screen reader even took one second to read each line as was intended.
