
Show HN: Improving accessibility of websites by providing image OCR in-browser - LinguaBrowse
https://twitter.com/LinguaBrowse/status/1059427821452443650
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LinguaBrowse
This is an upcoming feature for my personal project, LinguaBrowse: an app for
browsing the foreign-language web. It principally applies transcriptions (such
as pīnyīn to Chinese, and furigana to Japanese) to text, but also provides
dictionary lookup for words with a single click. This demo is for the [macOS
version]([https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/linguabrowse/id1422884180?mt...](https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/linguabrowse/id1422884180?mt=12)),
although an [iOS
version]([https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/linguabrowse/id1281350165?mt...](https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/linguabrowse/id1281350165?mt=8))
also exists.

The macOS version is built in React Native, using the react-native-macos
community project. I write the code in Swift (for native) and TypeScript (for
the React Native JSContext). Ideally I'd have liked to have delivered a click-
to-OCR feature, but saving a copy of the file (hence the drag-and-drop) was
the only way I could find to overcome both:

* CORS issues, with loading the image data into Tesseract; and * the App Transport Security policy, which prevents mixed content in-browser and HTTP downloads by NSURLSession.

As a bonus, though, this methodology supports OCR of files dragged in from the
file system.

Happy to talk about any part of it. Always striving to make foreign-language
websites more readable.

