Kurzweil 1000 vs. OpenBook Two of the most common scanning and reading applications for those with print disabilities are made by Kurzweil Educational Systems and Freedom Scientific. I will attempt to showcase differences, advantages and demonstrate how the Kurzweil 1000 can better serve students. Scanning Optimization Kurzweil 1000: Kurzweil's innovative method for helping the user produce high quality scans of documents with very little knowledge can help both a novice and a veteran scanner. Key features like brightness, resolution, and prefered scanning engine can be determined automatically by placing a sample part of what you want to scan onto the scanner and allowing the program to try different configurations. This feature is especially useful when attempting to scan an entire book or a large portion of one. Generally one set of scanning configurations works well on an entire book. OpenBook: Does not at this time have any optimization settings. Scanning contrast has an Automatic setting that works some of the time, but it can be very frustrating attempting to manually find an acceptable range when it becomes necessary. Settings like despeckle, resolution, scanning engine, etc. can only be determined through user experimentation. Continuous Scanning and Recognition Kurzweil 1000: Supports both Scan and Recognize, Scan only and Recognition only. It can perform any of these during continuous scanning, which is especially useful when using confidence thresholding as discussed next. OpenBook: Supports Scan and Read of a single page at a time. Continuous scanning is offered, however, you must finish your "batch" before OpenBook will begin to recognize any pages. This can be a serious limitation as discussed in the next section. Confidence level Threshholding Kurzweil 1000: When a document is recognized, words are compared to the Kurzweil dictionary to determine the percentage of possible scanning errors. Users set a confidence level percentage and Kurzweil notifies the user if a page fails to meet that level. During continuous scanning and recognition, Kurzweil will notify the user immediately if there is a page that falls below the confidence level. It is very easy at that point to stop and examine that page to determine if the large percentage of errors was due to an illustration, bad placement of the book, etc. OpenBook: Does not at this time have any method for determining the quality of a scan. This is a serious limitation when attempting to scan a book. There could be a problem with any page or any number of pages, but you will not be aware of the problem until attempting to read the book. At that point it can be difficult to locate the page in the printed book to rescan. Essentially you have to guess where the page is and count pages based on the page numbers. If page numbers don't scan well, a binary method for searching must be employed. Neither method is friendly due to the amount of time both can require. Available Scan Modes Kurzweil 1000: Has four different scanning modes, static, dynamic, grayscale, and color. The Kurzweil 1000 will optimize among static, dynamic and grayscale scanning when using the aforementioned feature. OpenBook: Has a regular mode and a color scanning mode. When about a dozen or so color scans have been made OpenBook will often freeze. ReRecognize Options Kurzweil 1000: Has both a rerecognize page and rerecognize all option. This is especially useful if you forgot to make a change to your recognition settings before scanning. OpenBook: Does not have such a feature. You won't know that you should have made a change until you begin reading how many pages you scanned. This could be quite a lot depending on how big your batch is. (Additionally there is no confidence thresholding that could immediately alert you if your scans were horribly going astray). Even if it is just one page, you must scan the document again. Spell Checker/Dictionary Kurzweil 1000: Provides a spell checker and dictionary that are very user friendly and worthwhile. The user can choose to ignore words that start with capitals, are all caps and numerals. The dictionary is especially useful, wildcards like an asterisk (*) can be used to find words without knowing the exact spelling. OpenBook: Has a spell checker with few features. The dictionary is somewhat useful, but lacks wildcard support. Rank Spelling Kurzweil 1000: Handy feature that "ranks" what it thinks are misspelled words by the number of times they occur. Employing this feature can quickly make a document much easier to read because common errors are easily and efficiently corrected. OpenBook: OpenBook does not at current have any feature resembling the one in Kurzweil. User Defined Page Numbers Kurzweil 1000: Kurzweil's user defined page numbers works flawlessly. Kurzweil easily recognizes pages before number one in a book as preliminary pages and announces them as such. This is especially useful when using a textbook for class and not having to search for the page number in the text. Missing pages can easily be noticed if book page numbers do not match the number reported by the Kurzweil 1000. OpenBook: Has a user defined setting page option. However you can not set a page number lower than the original page number. OpenBook does not understand the concept of a preliminary page. Since I have never run across an instance where I want to make the page number greater, this feature is essentially useless. It provides no advantage for book navigation. Speech Synthesizer Support Kurzweil 1000: Ships with both IBM TTS/ViaVoice and NeoSpeak natural sounding voices. The Kurzweil 1000 is also compliant with any SAPI 5 synthesizer. This enables a wide variety of synthesizers to be picked from and installed by the user. OpenBook: Ships with the tel IBM TTS/ViaVoice synthesizers and RealSpeak natural sounding voices. The difference in the IBM voices shipping with OpenBook is striking. It sounds like a person talking through a muffled telephone connection. The voices are difficult to listen to for any more than a few minutes at a time. A user should not need to struggle to understand an application when the same company produces much more clear sounding voices. Using RealSpeak is not a viable alternative. The natural sounding voices take quite a bit of getting used to before you can understand them with any speed. RealSpeak voices also seem more processor and memory intensive to run. Find/Replace Support Kurzweil 1000: Has a useful find interface with options for Case Sensative searching. The Replace interface is also very useful, searches for end of lines, and other document markup is easily learned. The Kurzweil 1000 seems to handle nearly any ASCII character thrown at it including accented characters (á, é, í, ó, ú, ñ, etc.) OpenBook: Find feature does support Case Sensative and Whole word only searches. The Replace feature is very limited in that I have not discovered any way through experimentation or documentation to search for document markups, like an end of line character. Neither find or replace seems to work with ASCII characters other than standard letters and numbers. Accented characters and symbols like the degree sign º (ASCII value 167) fail entirely. (A degree sign is often mistaken for an "o" near the spine of a book and being able to easily replace them all would make for an easier reading experience). DAISY Formatted Books This is the digital XML based standard for talking books today. It is especially important that programs properly handle these types of files. For example www.BookShare.Org provides this as its primary format of distribution. Through a landmark agreement with O'Reilly publishing group, currently more than five hundred computer related titles have been provided in this form. This is a valuable resource to computer science majors like myself and a program that properly uses these files is a must have. Kurzweil 1000: Properly opens and displays these files accurately. Special markup data like page numbers stored in the "pagenum" tags are preserved as Kurzweil bookmarks. OpenBook: Does not properly open these documents. While a bug in version 7.01 that didn't allow the entire contents of some files to open has been addressed according to version 7.02 documentation, the support is still mediocre. Page breaks seem to be randomly inserted at OpenBook's whim. The same files were tested in both applications and the Kurzweil 1000 seemed to open them with the correct number of pages. It is unclear at this time what, if anything, OpenBook does with special DAISY markup. Accessing Online Content Kurzweil 1000: Correctly accesses and downloads content from many sources including NLS's WebBraille, BookShare.Org, Project Gutenberg, Wikopedia, Bean Free Library etc. Each seemed to return satisfactory results. Kurzweil Educational Systems was quick to address the need for a Project Gutenberg patch when PG moved the location of its books last fall. The online encyclopedia searches are especially useful for students looking for quick information on topics, whether it is as background reading or preliminary research for a project. OpenBook: Searches are available only for Project Gutenberg, Bean Free Library and BookShare.Org. However currently the Project Gutenberg search is broken, despite the version 7.02 documentation stating issues with online book searches had been addressed. Freedom Scientific did not release a Project Gutenberg patch near the same time Kurzweil Educational Systems did, it's unclear whether the current bug is the same one. Support for BookShare.Org seems to work correctly. Common Dialog Controls Common dialogs are those such as Open, Save, Save As, etc. Kurzweil 1000: Has the option to use Kurzweil created dialogs or Microsoft Common Dialogs. Microsoft Common Dialogs work correctly in the Windows XP environment, displaying all features as a similar dialog in another application would. OpenBook: Uses Microsoft Common Dialogs, but these dialogs do not fully work in the Windows XP environment. The dialogs do not have a full My Computer document tree in the drop down/combo box at the top of these dialogs. By default these dialogs are in a Details view, something I have never seen in any other application. The details view is quite annoying when working with someone sited. Default Storage Locations Kurzweil 1000: Creates a directory in the My Documents directory of the currently logged in user. This provides an easy location to access files. OpenBook: Stores documents in a default location like this: C:\OpenBK7\Users\Default\Library. This is an annoying place to transverse everytime you want to access files through Windows Explorer. Program Crashes Kurzweil 1000: During my testing of Kurzweil 1000, it did not crash nearly as often as OpenBook. When the Kurzweil 1000 did perform an error, often upon restart I was given the option to retrieve the document I had been working on, similar to Microsoft Word's recovery feature. OpenBook: OpenBook can sometimes work for long periods without crashes, but other times the program can crash multiple times within an hour. This program seemed to work slightly better when I disabled its internal speech and modified JFW scripts to leave JAWS running while working in OpenBook. Using JAWS was not a full solution though as problems still persisted. Using JAWS with OpenBook does come with drawbacks as well. Continuous reading was flaky at best and JAWS sometimes had trouble telling which line to read. Product Updates Kurzweil 1000: Kurzweil Educational Systems seems dedicated to improving and updating the Kurzweil 1000. Since summer 2004 they have released version 9.0 and the subsequent two minor updates and are looking forward to updating again in summer 2005. In the version 9.0 update released in August 2004, new recognition engines were included, among them Fine Reader v7.0. OpenBook: Has released one minor update v7.02 since I received the product in summer 2004. Freedom Scientific has not released any information regarding plans for future versions. The new Fine Reader v7.0 engine was not made available to OpenBook customers until December 2004, with the 7.02 update. This extra four month delay seems a bit much to incorperate third party software. Conclusion The differences I have outlined above are not the only ones the two programs share. I purposely avoided those features each program has. I believe the above features demonstrate quite clearly how the Kurzweil 1000 provides a more modern, stable and better working environment than does OpenBook. Versions Used Kurzweil 1000: I received a demo copy of version 9.0 on CD which I was quickly able to upgrade to version 9.02 using the update menu command within the Kurzweil 1000. I was also able to download articles concerning the product directly from within the Kurzwweil 1000. OpenBook: I received a licensed copy of OpenBook version 7.01 in summer 2004. In December 2004 I was able to download a copy of version 7.02 from the Freedom Scientific website. There is no feature inside the program for updating or a place to download product specific articles. Websites Kurzweil Educational Systems: www.KurzweilEdu.com Freedom Scientific: www.FreedomScientific.com Author Contact Please direct any questions, comments, thoughts, suggestions or corrections to the author at Jake@JBrownell.com Disclaimer All brands, product names, etc. mentioned in this document are held by Kurzweil Educational Systems, Freedom Scientific or their specific creator. No claim is made to any of them. Copyright 2005 J. A. Brownell