At Aventido we recognise how life-changing assistive technology is when used in the right context and sometimes it can be difficult to talk about it without using jargon.
One term that constantly comes up is O.C.R which is short for Optical Character Recognition.
In this article, you will gain an understanding of what O.C.R. is and what it does, and how it can be helpful to neurodiverse employees in the workplace.
What is O.C.R. and how does it work?
Optical Character Recognition is a technique for extracting text from a picture and then making it available for manipulation within other apps.
Imagine that you are in the workplace conducting a literature search and you have a book in front of you which you need to extract the text from so as to quote it in a report that you are writing on your computer.
The low-tech version of achieving this is to simply copy the text and type it straight into your computer, which works, but it is time-consuming based on your typing skills and equally, it may be subject to errors as you type.
What O.C.R. does is take a picture of the original text and then it looks for the text in the picture and essentially transfers that text into an editable version within another app.
The video below demonstrates how O.C.R. works within Pro-Workspace, a leading software product that is used in the workplace to collate research and makes the text available for further manipulation within apps such as Microsoft Word.
How does O.C.R help a neurodiverse employee in the workplace?
No two employees who are neurodiverse will have exactly the same needs but speaking in general terms being neurodiverse can affect skills with literacy, comprehension, working memory, rates of processing information, organisation skills, focus, and concentration. Without access to technology tools that assist with some of these difficulties, some employees can experience anxiety and embarrassment depending upon how their neurodiversity presents and impacts on their ability to do their work.
Optical Character Recognition technology can help an employee to take information and make it accessible so that they can interact with it in a way that works with them e.g read out the text using text-to-speech technology.
In the case of Pro-Workspace in the video above, an employee can extract text from a book and store it for future retrieval and editing using the clever cataloguing features that Pro-Workspace provides.
If you would like to experience using O.C.R or more particularly Pro-Workspace and see how it can help you with your research needs then click the banner below to find out more.
