Looking for magsafe scanning flatbed alignment like... something?

It might work. You might need another remote. This one will let you navigate your phone with Voiceover, so you just get on to the button that let's you can, and push the center button to activate.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08VF1VJRB

Alternatively, there was a thread about this a while back and somebody recommended a stand they were using, not sure if it was magsafe, but I think it was like a tripod thingy with an extended arm with the phone at the end. It was on scanning in general, I'll try to find it and the stand recommendation for you.

The thing the Scanjig does, and similar stands, I think there's at least one more, is give you a way to try to line the book/document up, something that might be harder with a more free-standing option. Well not just line it up, but make sure it's placed under the camera properly. The Scanjig isn't magsafe but the phone sits on top of it and I think once you figure out the alignment, you put guide things on either side of where the phone goes and put the phone between them and that makes sure it's lined up properly.

https://www.applevis.com/forum/assistive-technology/looking-device-read-physical-books

The word budget is in the comment you want, they just give an Amazon link with a bit of a description. I figure you might find the entire thing more or less interesting.

Sure. The only reason I suggested the remote is in case the software doesn't do automatic batch scanning, or you don't want to use it for whatever reason. In that case, you'd have to find the button and tap the phone each time you wanted to scan. I feel like a remote would be a bit easier, in that case.

I honestly don't know what scanning software exists for the phone, I need to dig into all of this and probably get a Scanjig to try it. I have the Pearl camera but I'm on Mac now and there's no driver that makes it work, that I know of. It does show up as a device if you plug it in but not as a camera/scanner that's usable.

I could run Openbook in a Windows VM I guess, but I haven't felt like messing with it all. I will say that Openbook's scanning is pretty good, I tried ABBY Finereader a few years back, when they were touting AI, and I didn't get any better OCR out of it than Openbook.

I know KNFB Reader, or whatever they're calling it now, exists for the phone, I bought it for Windows when it was on sale, and honestly, I wasn't too impressed, it seemed pretty clunky to use and either gave me equal or worse results compared to Openbook. Maybe it's better on the phone though. I know Voicedream Scanner exists, but I don't know if they're doing subscription or something like the reader.

If you end up trying this, let me know what your thoughts are, particularly on the software you end up trying/using. I'd be particularly interested in something that's useful for scanning books, as books, i.e. I'm not tearing them apart or whatever, since that's mostly what I'd be scanning. The Pearl is nice because it has motion detection for batch scanning, but I'd imagine most decent phone apps could handle this as well. Essentially that's what these stands are doing, turning your phone into a document camera, which is what the Pearl is, with a bit of modification to make it easier for us to line things up.

That's sort of my worry with the phone stuff, and the stand(s), I feel like when most people talk about "scanning documents", they're thinking of reading your mail or something. Absolutely useful and it had better be able to handle that, but I also need something that can deal with books, in their multiple sizes and shapes, and let me get them into various formats, RTF, plain text, whatever. I see a lot of stuff that wants to generate PDF files, which I'm not really a fan of.

It's supposed to, but I never got it working with KNFB Reader. To be fair though, I didn't really try that hard. It works great with Openbook. If you like Openbook and its results, I'd recommend it. But it's possible your phone and a scanning stand would do the same basic thing.

One thing I do like about Pearl is that they recommend strategies. For instance, suppose you have one of those wide hard cover books. First, you scan a page at a time by lining up the edge of the book for each page, so you do the left page by lining up that edge, then slide it over to line up the right edge with the right edge of the base of the camera. They recommend masking the other page with a blank piece of paper so you don't get extra stuff scanned.

I don't know what the Scanjig looks like, so I don't know if it can do that, although I guess if it's open on the front and back, then you could orient the book that way and slide it forward and backward. If it's not though, I feel like that would limit the size of books/documents you could scan with it.

I like the Pearl, but you are locked into Freedom Scientific for the most part, or whatever they're calling themselves these days. I wish the hardware was a bit more generic, in terms of being recognized, a class compliant device would be nice. So I can see some advantages to using a phone for this kind of thing. But I've also tried to outline some of the potential issues I can see with that.

But again, like I mentioned, I think Openbook gives pretty decent OCR results, I still haven't found anything better. Pearl and Openbook were what I was using until I switched to the Mac. I still have no idea what decent scanning software there is for Mac.

I haven't tried setting up Openbook in the VM yet because I probably need to upgrade my Mac, I'm running a base Mini M2, so only 8 GB of memory. Openbook would probably work, but I figure whenever I upgrade, everything will be better off, and I can just wait to install the stuff that might need more memory and speed.

Oh sure. I'm only using it, or was, because like I said, I didn't find anything that gave better scan results the last time I checked. I already owned it, so I figured I might as well. For a while I actually uninstalled it and was using KNFB Reader, but I thought it wasn't doing that great, so I ended up reinstalling OB to see if it was any better, and it was.

I'd be quite happy to never use anything from FS again, unless I can get the Pearl working with something else because that does work pretty well. I didn't have the issues you're having but IMO they install *way* too much extra junk with their stuff, and having to call if you run out of activations is really annoying.

Have you tried turning off your screen reader/putting it to sleep and using OB's internal speech? I think that's what I used to do. Maybe that would get it working a bit better until you find another solution.

I started using Openbook when Windows 3.1 was new, and Openbook was made by Arkenstone. I have an old harddrive somewhere that probably has close to 1,000 books saved on it, and I used it more on other computers after that. I loved it at the time, and I used it until about 2010 or 2011, but at this point, I wouldn't install it if I got it for free.

First, as someone previously mentioned, the last new release was in the Windows 7 days. I don't have the hatrid that many do for Freedom Scientific/Vispero -- did anyone see that they are finally changing their name in their software? It only took 8 years. Anyway, I don't have the hatrid that many do for them but if they are still charging for Openbook, that's rediculous. This is coming from someone who is certified in both JAWS and NVDA and who still prefers JAWS for most things.

You can find OCR options that work just as well now for much less money. For my mail, I just use the OCR in JAWS. If I needed something more robust, I would probably buy Abbyy Finereader. I've heard that it's accessible and works well. If I didn't want to spend that much, there's a version of Docuscan still floating around out there that you can subscribe to. I'm not sure how well it works though.