As a visually impaired person, would you like to be able to read your mail, newspapers, magazines, books and other documents for a fraction of what it would cost you for a specialist optical character recognition computer program? If you are already using specialist O C R software which needs upgrading, would you like to avoid the high cost of such upgrades by purchasing an up-to-date, off-the-shelf package? If your answer to these questions is yes, following the success of my Internet manual, I have written a series of manuals explaining how to use non-specialist text recognition programs as reading machines for visually impaired people with their current computer and screenreader.

Instead of costing anything from £600 to over £2,000, which specialist packages typically cost, programs such as TextBridge Pro 9 and Omnipage Pro 10 only cost in the region of 60 pounds to 80 pounds.

You can buy a modern parallel port or U S B scanner from 50 pounds to 100 pounds and even many best-named scanners, such as Epsom and Hewlett Packard, can be obtained for under 200 pounds. Additionally, modern flatbed scanners come with a limited or classic version of a text recognition program such as TextBridge 98 classic, which will perform the basic document scanning for you, following which you can open the scanned document in your favourite text editor or word-processor for reading, editing and saving.

OmniPage Pro 10, for example, even comes with its own speech output capability, so that it can read what it scans to you without you even needing your own screenreader.

You can purchase a basic flatbed scanner and included classic scanning software package for a sum of as little as 50 pounds or a more advanced fully-featured O C R, such as OmniPage Pro 10 plus a good quality Hewlett Packard flatbed scanner, for less than 250 pounds.

Whilst such off-the-shelf O C R software is not made specifically for the visually impaired and is designed for the use of a monitor and mouse, I have tested and written manuals for several of these packages giving instructions on how they can be used very successfully with a screenreader from the keyboard. Each individual manual can be purchased for 10 pounds by e-mail transfer or on floppy disk as an A S C I I text file or you may purchase several manuals on C D-ROM, together with demo versions of the O C R software itself for your own testing and evaluation prior to purchasing a full version from the manufacturer. The multi-manual plus software demo C D-ROM costs 30 pounds per disk.

You may also be interested in a manual which I partly wrote several months ago but did not finish. I have now completed it. The manual is for visually impaired users of Word 97/Word98. It is designed to enable the use of Word 97 without a monitor or mouse and is entitled Microsoft Word 97 from the Keyboard. It is available either by e-mail transfer or on floppy disk. It costs £10 per copy. For more information or to place an order, please phone John Wilson on 0113 2575957 or e-mail to jwjw@cwcom.net