Tech Thursday: Extract Text From Images

Often, announcements meant to be shared with students are sent as highly formatted PDFs with no plain text versions available - this website is a good solution!

I shared in a past Tech Thursday post about apps which grab text from print sources, and today is a somewhat related tech tool. This is an online text extractor tool that pulls the text from an image or PDF into copy-able plain text. You can then use the text to create plain-text emails, announcements, calendar invites - anywhere that a graphic just won’t work as well.

Why this is so great

Beyond just creating a plain text version for personal use, think about all the screenshots, memes or other images, PDFs and infographics that you want to post for students. Now there is an easy way to create the alt-text that is helpful for screen readers as well as for anyone on a mobile device.

Here’s what it looks like when you upload either an image (cartoon at the top) or PDF:

The text captured is pretty accurate, even for the handwritten cartoon. It has long been a pet peeve of mine that announcements meant to be shared with students are sent as highly formatted PDFs with no plain text available, and always much prefer to create a plain text copy to share in LMS announcements and calendar invites. This website solves that issue, and I’m delighted to have found it.

Happy Alt-Text Creating!

Past Tech Thursdays

• Student engagement: Climer cards / Digital exit tickets / Interactive quizzing / Online question management for classes & presentations / Wheel of Names (random name generator) / Providing audio feedback

• Health: Two programs to reduce eyestrain

• Zoom: Screen share in Zoom / How to Zoom in in Zoom

• Research: Managing references / Find free versions of articles / Text Capture Apps

• Using images: Remove distracting backgrounds from photos / Using screenshots

• Google: “Publish” from Google Drive / Google Classroom updates / “Make a copy” function in Google Drive / Working in shared Google docs / Collaborating in Google Slides / Turn Google Forms into a formatted document

• Canvas: Canvas “What-if” grades

• Productivity: Keyboard shortcuts / Text Expanders / Mailbird email program / Voice-to-text options / Custom URLs & QR codes / DropBox Paper for collaboration