Paste an image that contains text onto a OneNote page. It can convert the text in images to plain text.

OneNote is part of the Microsoft Office suite if you have Word and Excel, you probably have OneNote. But if it’s a lot of text? That option is less attractive. If it’s just a few sentences, it’s not a big deal to just type it out. Or maybe there is some text I have in an image that I want to be able to edit. For the curious, the alt-text is “Image of text from a previous blog post,” and you may even be able to read that text by mousing over the image.īut, really, if the text in the image is important, I should use the text itself, not an image of the text. A screen reader would come to this image and read the alt-text. It’s just a quick screenshot of text from a previous blog post. In that vein, I have been thinking about OCR – optical character recognition. Are our videos captioned? Do our webpages and document images have alt-text that can be read by screen readers? You probably won’t be performing text extraction against 1920s magazine articles-maybe so, if you’re like me!-but the slightly degraded nature of the source text and quality of the scan puts the services and software to a more substantial test than pristine rendered typography.We have been talking a lot at my college about accessibility. You can see the figures below with each app or service noted.

For a side-by-side comparison that demonstrated my results starkly, I copied out the results of recognition against the same legibly typeset magazine copy from a 1920s Popular Mechanics article (about comic-strip production). In researching this article, I tested a range of images and documents that proved fairly consistent across each service or app.

You may already have a free account or paid subscription to one of the services below or own the software. These types also include PDFs with scanned images that have no text layer already inserted or extracted. If you are trying to access text in images you have, whether documents, photos, or forms, you have many options available.

Image convert to text onenote