Education is one of the fundamental rights of every person irrespective of their gender, age, race, and physical abilities. However, the education here is not only limited to the degrees and diplomas that students acquire from the educational institutes. Although it also includes the typical education, in this article, education means learning different things throughout life.
The tragedy of the entire world is that the governments and institutions don’t take the necessary steps to provide education to everyone, especially when it comes to physically challenged learners. On the positive side, modern technology is helping them learn whatever they want.
This article will briefly discuss a technology that provides many benefits to physically challenged learners.
Optical Character Recognition
Optical Character Recognition is the process of extracting text from the images. This technology helps people convert PDF files, scanned documents, and digital photos into editable text. OCR is also used to detect handwritten text in photos efficiently. That’s how this technology is helping people in their tasks. Before mentioning the benefits of OCR in learning, let’s discuss what some other uses of OCR are:
- OCR technology can save a lot of time of people as they can convert PDF files and images into editable text
- It is helping people save the time they need to devote to fetching words from the view-only files.
- It also saves some people money on hiring freelancers to extract data.
- This technology makes documents editable.
Coming to the topic!
OCR Helps Color Blind and Blind People
OCR enables colour-blind people to learn what is written in any file. Usually, those people cannot read files with specific colours they cannot see. Sometimes data is shared in the form of images It is a big hurdle in their learning, and for that purpose, they used to get help from others to remove the colours they could not differentiate. However, OCR has removed this barrier. Now they can easily differentiate and recognize the characters. Besides that, they also don’t need help from others to do the task.
Blind people cannot read what is written on images, slides or notes. They can understand the lectures with voices. So OCR is also helping them in this regard. They can convert images of notes, slides etc into textual form and then those text into speech.
There are many free image to text converters available online that are not only easy to use but also efficient in recognizing and extracting the text. If you want to convert those images into text, find a reliable picture to text converter that industry experts recommend like the one:https://www.duplichecker.com/image-to-text-converter.php. You only need to upload the files into the tool and press the convert button. You will get your converted file that you can download in your desired format. That’s how the OCR-based photo to text converter helps colour-blind/blind people in their learning.
Helps with the Conversion of Text to Speech
Some physically challenged learners cannot remember the words or lectures when they are in written form. This could happen to anyone. Some blind people cannot read notes or books. Even some people don’t want to read long-form articles or lectures. So, the OCR has come up with a solution to this problem. Now you don’t need to do anything except convert those lectures into speech form.
Once the text is converted, people can easily listen to those lectures and get the message that tutors want to convey. The OCR-based tools can convert text to speech and allow them to select the tone, speed, language and pitch.
Breaks the Language barriers
International students face a severe problem in universities. Sometimes they don’t fully command the language they have to listen to and read the lectures. It can also be considered a barrier or challenge in learning. But thankfully, OCR has also provided the solution to this issue. Once you convert the files into text with the assistance of OCR, they can easily transform the text into their native language. As a result, they can easily understand the concepts and theories when listening to or reading the lectures in their native language. It can ultimately improve their grades and enable them to complete their education with distinction.
Change Fonts and Their Sizes to Understand
Another physical challenge many people face is that they cannot read some font styles, especially in small font sizes. Some books, images, and lectures are written in small font sizes, creating difficulties for physically challenged learners. To get rid of this difficulty, those exceptional learners can again use the tools that are supported by outstanding technology.
After converting images to text, the students can enlarge their font sizes and create a document in a way that is understandable to them.
Conclusion
OCR technology is helping people in many ways, especially in the case of learning. The applications of OCR in education enable special people to compete with others, get good grades, and achieve what they want in their lives. However, keep in mind that OCR is very beneficial in assisting people in their work, but it is not 100% accurate and needs many improvements to make it perfect. After those improvements, it would be easier for them to perfectly recognize the images and fetch the text out of them.
