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Show HN: Improving accessibility of websites by providing image OCR in-browser (twitter.com/linguabrowse)
2 points by LinguaBrowse on Nov 5, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment


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...), although an [iOS version](https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/linguabrowse/id1281350165?mt...) 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.




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