I've been trying to do the impossible, more like the
impractical, for some time now so I need a knowledge infusion.
I want to be able to read the VGA output of a computer,
do OCR on it and have ASCII text.
As a computer user who happens to be blind, one of the
most frustrating issues is the fact that except for expensive
servers, none of these boxes output any machine readable text
when booting up or in setup mode such as when the coin cell that
powers the CMOS BIOS gives up the ghost and one needs to do a
setup on it, etc.
It seems as though we may have reached one milestone in
that one can buy a usb frame grabber that spits out UVC
webcam-style video. The representative of the company which
makes the device told me that most common flavors of VGA cards
produce signals that would work with the device but some odd-ball
cards won't work with it which makes sense.
Assuming most will work, what one would have is frame
after frame of digitized video. If this is a setup screen, the
only thing likely to be changing until you do something is the
cursor may be blinking otherwise, it's going to be pretty stable.
You'd have one frame of video to do the OCR on and then
one does something such as hit the Tab or one of the arrow keys
and then you grab another frame and read it and so forth.
Are there any free projects out there which take the raw
video as input and output text as output since the frame grabber
is just the beginning of the beast and then you have to convert
it to text and maybe some method of determining where the
highlight as in cursor position is so as to know what one is
about to select?
Needless to say, but saying it anyway to avoid confusion,
one would have the frame grabber and text engine on a different
working debian computer since the sick one isn't capable of doing much
until the BIOS gets set correctly.
I have 4 older PC's that generally work well running
debian but Right now, 3 of them need varying degrees of attention
to their BIOS setups as Dell motherboards and possibly other
brands will occasionally modify their boot sequences for some
reason and the only way one can boot from a CDROM is to get in to
the BIOS setup and yank the boot order back to one where the CD
drive is ahead of the hard drive or put an unbootable hard drive
in. Six or eight months later, one will suddenly discover that
the boot sequence has fallen back to the useless one where the
floppy drive is first, followed by the hard drive followed by the
CDROM.
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ
