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Converting bitmaps to text isn't enough to make an interface usable. You need to be able to quickly convey the structure of the interface and what controls are
by danShumway 6y ago
Converting bitmaps to text isn't enough to make an interface usable. You need to be able to quickly convey the structure of the interface and what controls are available, and to do that well you need some kind of semantic insight into the interface.
Screenreaders don't just read text, they control the interface itself using standardized keyboard shortcuts and input components within whatever graphical framework you're using, and they communicate what that interface is using a set of standardized terminology.
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoI indeed am imparted that the term “screen reader” is a misnomer and not what I expected it to be. This seems to be more so an “accessibility suite” of which text-to-speech is a component rather than what I would call a “screen reader".
- danShumway 6y agoSorry, I guess? It's been an industry standard phrase for a pretty long time. Screenreaders probably have a historical reason why they're named the way they are, but the short version is that's just what everyone started using. A lot of software terminology is like that, it's weird to people who are unfamiliar with it because there's no central committee somewhere that decides what everything should be named. If you're trying to do a search online for the kind of tool you're looking for, probably the phrase you would want to search for is "OCR software", short for Optical Character Recognition, or if you're trying to tag images just straight-up "image recognition."