The Episode
Rachel Kuberry
Rachel is the Assistive Technology Specialist for Lexington Public Schools. If you want to hear more about her job, you’re in luck! She has a podcast:
Exceptional Special Ed
OCR
Optical Character Recognition is how text on an image is searchable. Some files that you think are text the web treats like and image, like PDFs. Without ORC, you wouldn’t be able to search things like our Town Crier Digital Archive.
Here’s how it works:
1) Extraction of Character boundaries from Image,
2) Building a Convolutional Neural Network(ConvNet) in remembering the Character images,
3) Loading trained Convolutional Neural Network(ConvNet) Model,
4) Consolidating ConvNet predictions of characters
Image Source: https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/4-simple-steps-in-building-ocr-1f41c66099c1
Speech To Text
What used to be the realm of specialty applications like Dragon Naturally Speaking, thanks to improvements in voice recognition technology, is now something you can use on any smartphone.
Food For Thought
Question: What do George Orwell, Macintosh Computers, and Universal Design for Learning have in common?
Answer: 1984
It’s the title of Orwell’s famous work, it’s the year of the first Macintosh computer, and it’s the year that Center for Applied Special Technology, or CAST, was formed.
(Source of CAST timeline: https://www.cast.org/impact/timeline-innovation)
