Reading Machine

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What we call ’Reading Machine’ is a set of devices that help to read mail in particular and texts in general. To view the pages below, use the traduction software : https://deepl.com

Various cases can be presented :

Messaging
Documents html, internet
Audio documents
Documents txt

Lis pour moi

Documents pdf-text
Documents image
Two machines in preparation

Messaging

Read email with Thunderbird

Internet, html documents

Read an article on the internet

Reading an html document is easy, that’s why it can be interesting to modify a document to put it in html.

Transform an odt or doc or docx document into html

Audio documents

Read an audiobook

Texts documents

Reading a txt document is powerful. That’s why it can be interesting to modify a document to txt.

• Read a txt document
• Transform an .odt document into a .txt document
• Transform a pdf-text document into a .txt document

Read a pdf-text document

Transform a pdf-text document into a .txt-document

Image documents

There are problems with image documents. This can happen in two ways :

• 1 - the photo of a page of text, resulting in a jpg or png document
• 2 - a scan of a page of text, which results in a pdf-image.

In both cases, you can’t copy and paste, so you can’t make a txt or html document. A special case : encrypted documents that can be read, that can be copied, but that give, when pasted, a nice collection of cabalistic signs. It is poetic but unusable.

Aciah-linux offers you two tools :

• 1 - read on the fly
• 2 - read and get the text

1 - Read on the fly

• 1 - go to the file, so it is selected.
• 2 - do not open the file, i.e. do not validate with enter.
• 3 - make a contextual menu or a right-click.
• 4 - then go down to the Scripts line, or just press the S key
• 5 - validate with Enter
• 6 - go down to : B-read-a-lot.
• 7 - validate with : Enter.

• 8 - you hear the text being read. If you hear two voices, hit the CTRL key once.
• 9 - be careful, if the text is long it can take a long time.

You can stop the reading by pressing : WIN + ALT + E but then you can’t resume the reading.

• 10 - if you want to resume reading, do again : contextual menu, then S then Enter then B-read-on-the-fly and Enter.
• 11 - when playback is finished, you hear : playback finished.

It can be very practical to hear the reading of the text but you cannot copy this text. Hence the following script.

2 - read and get the text

• 1 - go to the file. Thus it is selected.
• 2 - do not open the file, i.e. do not validate with enter.
• 3 - make a contextual menu or a right-click.
• 4 - then go down to :the line : Scripts, or just hit the S key
• 5 - Validate with Enter
• 6 - go down on : A-read-and-get-text
• 7- validate with : Enter.

• 8 - you get a file in the original folder and in the Machine-a-Lire folder, with the same name as the original file and the extension .txt.
• 9 - the resulting file can be renamed, moved or deleted.
• 10 - the text of the .txt file can be read, copied and pasted, modified.

The manipulation is fast, the obtained text is of good quality, even for pages presented in columns.

Two machines in preparation

Two machines are in preparation.

• One will be an application on ordiphone. It is the work of Digital4Better, in patronage of skills.

• the other is being prepared by the Aciah team, with the support of the Orange Foundation. We are working on a Raspberry Pi. With the one we have, the software works, the camera works, the battery lasts at least two hours, we are adapting a speaker.
  We will then have to make the box, putting the on-off buttons in it. But the pandemic multiplies the worries : shortage of some materials, difficulties of transport and deliveries, postponed appointments for illness or confinement. We are still making progress !