Reading appliance and other LCD displays with iPhone

By JP, 26 February, 2021

Forum
App Development and Programming
Hi all, I'm revisiting a subject that is still not solved and I keep hoping that one day it will be. The iPhone has several Apps to read printed text, but none can read an LCD display on an appliance or other gadget that has a digital display, why is that? With so much advancement in AIand high resolution immiging, you would think that it is not so complicated. Yet, it seems that it is very complicated., proven by the fact that we don't have one yet. Anyone has any new information, or comment on this? Thank you.

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Comments

By peter

2 years 1 month ago

Yes, one would think that it would be easy to read LCD displays. I understand that the contrast may not be perfect, but OCR does pretty well with printed text on strange backgrounds. Also it is a lot easier to do OCR on digitally produced text than something like handwriting.

The other feature that I would love to see is to have the image recognition actually read just the part of the display near where you hold your finger. sometimes devices with buttons and lots of little displays can be hard to operate even if the phone can recognize all of the text because you need to know which specific button or location to press. thus it would be nice to know what the text is where your finger is placed.

--Pete

By DPinWI

2 years 1 month ago

I agree this would be nice. I just got a new dishwaher, and it has a flat button panel. I can read it with Seeing AI, but all the buttons run together, and it's not all that helpful. I will get it marked up with tactile dots, but it would be nice if I could point to a button, and have the phone tell me the associated label. It appears to have an LED screen, since I could read the time remaining, and a couple other lit indicators.

By Ekaj

2 years ago

I recently downloaded and installed a free app called Laundry Lens, and took it for a spin. I got a readout of something that sounded like the settings on the clothes dryer here in my apartment complex. But I was a bit confused since everything seemed to run together. But has anyone else used this app and if so what are your opinions? It is totally accessible with VO and seems to do as advertised. I've also tried out SuperSense and Seeing AI for this purpose, and again got confusing results.