Teaching children is a difficult task. All children have their own challenges when it comes to learning things. One of the most common is reading issues.
Problems like dyslexia, poor eyesight, poor focus, etc, can result in children being unable to read properly. However, there are ways to work around these issues and ensure that kids can read or interact with books meaningfully.
Today, we are going to talk about optical character recognition (OCR) and how it can help children with reading challenges overcome them.
Methods of Improving Reading Using OCR
Printed material can be difficult to process for students with reading difficulties. Something about sitting down to read a book is hard for children, specifically because all they want to do is go outside and play.
If they have attention span issues on top of that, then you will find that reading becomes an ordeal.
With OCR, you can convert physical books into digital versions. A digital copy of a text opens it up to be used in a variety of ways. Some of these ways are easier for children to interact with.
It allows for integration with assistive tools and technology that can help students and children read better. Let’s check them out.
The way this works is that you take a picture of the page (or scan it) and then run it through an online image-to-text converter (OCR tool) to digitize it. Then you can reap the benefits of the digital version.
1. Compatibility With Text-to-Speech Technology
One of the most impactful uses of OCR is its ability to work alongside text-to-speech systems. After OCR extracts text from a scan or image, students can listen to the content instead of reading it.
This is immensely helpful to children who suffer from dyslexia. It is also great for kids with ADHD, as they can put on the reading into a text-to-speech tool and then do other tasks alongside listening to their reading material.
So, it helps them to get started, and sometimes that’s all they need. Once they are in the groove, they can concentrate more easily and focus better, which improves their learning.
2. Customizable Reading Experience
Printed materials are quite rigid. You cannot change their font type or size. You also cannot edit them in any meaningful way.
Digital copies are much more lenient in this regard, provided they are not locked, undeditable PDFs. But even that can be bypassed with OCR. Digital copies created with an image-to-text converter are completely editable.
So children can use those copies and change them to make reading easier. Some things they can try are:
- Changing to a more legible font
- Increasing font size to make reading easier
- Replacing difficult words with synonyms
- Changing the font and background colors to make reading easier
Of course, since children are often too young to understand how to do these things, their parents/guardians or teachers have the responsibility to do this.
3. Easier Navigation and Learning Efficiency
Another problem with physical text is that it’s slow and cumbersome to manually search for specific text or topics. You can use the glossary and the index to manually search for broader topics, but you really have to hunt for any specific sentences or references.
When you convert the text into a digital version with OCR, you can easily search through it using keywords. This makes it very easy to navigate long or complex reading materials.
Students can also bookmark specific text and annotate the content with notes and remarks to enhance their understanding of it. Overall, reviewing reading material becomes extremely fast, which is a great boon during exam preparation.
Addressing OCR Errors
As good as OCR is, it is not without its faults. OCR is not 100% accurate if the source materials are of low quality. The following faults in the source material can result in inaccuracies.
- Poor scan or image quality. OCR requires high-quality, clear images of text to operate at peak efficiency.
- Artifacts like dust, stray pixels, and smudged ink can all hinder the OCR tool’s ability to recognize text accurately.
- Irregular handwriting and fonts are difficult for OCR tools to understand, so if the text has those, then accuracy will drop.
That’s why, when using OCR, students or educators should review and correct the converted text before using it. OCR tools work best with standard fonts used in word processors and typewriters.
Final Thoughts
So, that’s how OCR technology can help students with reading issues. It lets them put the content into a digital format where they can use text-to-speech to listen to it or improve its formatting to make it easier to read. It also makes the text easier to search and overall improves the quality of reading students can get done compared to traditional methods.