Googles Lookout app for vision-impaired now scans food labels and long documents
Paper forms and similarly shaped products at the store present a challenge for blind folks and this ought to make things easier.
If a sighted person can accidentally buy the wrong kind of peanut butter, what chance does someone who cant read the label themselves have?
The new food label mode, then, is less about reading text and more about recognizing exactly what product its looking at. It compares what it sees to a database of product images, and when it gets a match it reads off the relevant information: brand, product, flavor, other relevant information.
Document scanning isnt exactly exciting, but its good to have the option built in a straightforward way into a general-purpose artificial vision app.
It works as youd expect: Point your phone at the document and it scans it for your screen reader to read out.
The quick read mode that the app debuted with last year, which watches for text in the camera view and reads it out loud, has gotten some speed improvements.
The update brings a few other conveniences to the app, which should run on any Android phone with 2 gigs of RAM and running version 6.0 or higher.
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