Your website is important to your customers, particularly if you deal with engineering facts or complex legal documents and reports that involve hundreds of pages.
Let's say you are an attorney dealing with a complex lawsuit involving asbestos. You have charts, and graphs, photos, pdf documents, and more.
Another attorney wants to see everything you've got to see if they can team up with you in the lawsuit.
The big problem is that dozens of your pages are not searchable. The solution is to add the use of OCR technology to assist you.
What's OCR technology?
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, and for websites, it makes many aspects of your previous documents searchable.
1. Turning PDF's into searchable documents.
A PDF is the preferred business standard for transmitting complex documents over the web. With a PDF, unlike software such as Microsoft Word, the end reader doesn't need to have Microsoft word to read the document correctly. A PDF always arrives at the same
format when transmitted over the web.
But what is the second attorney who wants to create a word document, to edit and annotate key parts of your presentation? If the right software is used to make this possible, then it speeds the flow of business.
2. Turning images into text
Again, taking the same example of a second attorney examining the website of an asbestos attorney.
There may be a single document with 300 or 400 images.
It may be apparent to a trained attorney what each photo represents, but unfortunately, what is in the mind is not on paper. Using a text scanner from image software. each photograph can be labelled with the appropriate text.
Let's say attorney number 2 is only concerned with asbestos-related damage at a Naval Shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia.
If you use OCR software, that attorney can do a search for 400 images and pick out the 4 out of 400 that concerns the Naval Shipyard in Northfolk.
3. Barcode searching
Using a C# barcode reader, a thousand or more pages can be easily labelled. Yes, it's possible to do a rudimentary search through using control F, but OCR reading from the right software can take even 10,000 documents at a time and narrow the search parameters quickly and with precision.
Even a single word or phrase can be searched which makes it extremely useful for customers.
4. Scanning of government documents
There are thousands of government documents and fortunately, governments, including local and state, have recognized the benefit of OCR technology.
The full form of OCR allows those forms to be embedded in your website without any additional coding.
This is particularly great for example for a building contractor that needs to deal with permit situations to do an add-on to a home or build a deck on the back of the house.
With a flick of the wrist, the local building code and permit forms can be instantly downloaded so customers can readily see everything that is involved.
5. Translations and machine-reader
One fantastic advantage of having everything in an OCR format is that with a flip of a mouse you can get quite reasonable translations into Arabic, German, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Japanese. Chinese or Russian. There are hundreds of language translators available, and having everything turned into machine language makes this possible.
In addition, there are thousands of blind people or people with limited vision, and having everything turned into machine language allows screen readers to read books, and magazines as well as to describe images and graphs.