New Vision Concepts
EZReader - EZCamera Help

    

Table of Contents

Return to the main EZReader Help page.

 OverView

EZCamera displays any camera attached to the computer. By default the video is displayed full screen (1920x1080 resolution). The user clicks on the image to zoom in and right-clicks to zoom out. The escape button exits from EZCamera.

For many users, that's all the capability they need, but EZCamera has many more features, including 5 different display modes:

 Commands

EZCamera supports dozens of commands. These may be executed by taking one of four actions:

  1. Screen Clicks
  2. Toolbar Buttons
  3. Command Menu
  4. Keyboard Shortcuts


1. Screen Clicks

The simplest way to tell EZCamera what to do is click on the screen. This image shows where the main screen may be clicked to perform specific actions.

For the corner or side-of-screen actions, the active areas for clicking are roughly 2" square.

Anywhere else on the screen can be clicked or right-clicked to zoom in or zoom out.


2. Toolbar Buttons

The main EZCamera window displays the camera. By default, a full screen display is shown but an optional toolbar may be displayed at the top of the window. The OCR text dialog and the SnapShot History dialog both have toolbars that are always displayed.

When the toolbar is visible, the user simply presses the desired command.

By default, all of the icons on a toolbar are displayed in a single row, called a "wide toolbar".

But to simplify the screen, toolbars can be split into multiple rows, with each row having fewer icons to reduce visual complexity for low vision users. In this case, the rightmost icon is used to display the next row of icons. When the last row of icons is reached, pressing the right-most icon will return to the first row of icons.

The right-most icon displays 2 or more dots, corresponding to how many rows of icons are available. The dot with the white center indicates which row of icons is currently displayed.

If a wide toolbar is shown, the toolbar buttons do not have a text caption. But if the low complexity toolbars are shown, each button does include a caption to guide users on what action the button performs.


3. Command Menu

By default, EZCamera keeps the camera display fills the screen and is clear of visual obstructions. However, a popup menu of commands can be temporarily displayed. The menu consists of a list of actions the user can take, as well as a list of available keyboard shortcuts. Once an action is taken the menu automatically closes. Alternately, the use may right-click the list of press ESC to close the command menu.

Lines which begin with a "*" are active - meaning clicking them will perform the described action.

Lines without a "*" are informational only, representing commands which must be taken when the menu is hidden.

The command menu contains the following line items:

To exit the command menu, press ESC or right click anywhere on the list.


4. Keyboard Shortcuts

Commands may also be entered by pressing the appropriate keys, or key-combinations. The approximately 30 shortcut keys are listed here, grouped into various categories:

 SnapShot History Dialog

The SnapShot History Dialog displays a list of all snapshots. Selecting a snapshot displays it to the right of the list.

The dialog supports a number of actions which can be taken from the always-shown toolbar or by pressing a short cut key.

The function of each toolbar action is labeled on the toolbar.

The following shortcut key actions are also available for the SnapShot History dialog:

 OCR Text Dialog

EZCamera is able to extract text from images. This is called optical character recognition (OCR). The OCR engine used by EZCamera is called "Tesseract".

The text may be extracted directly from the video feed or may be extracted from a snapshot.

Once extracts, the text is displayed in the following dialog:

The dialog supports a number of actions which can be taken from the always-shown toolbar or by pressing a short cut key.

The function of each toolbar action is labeled on the toolbar.

The following shortcut key actions are also available for the OCR Text dialog:

 Zoom Algorithm

By default, EZCamera zooms in and out of an image by using digital algorithms. As with all digital zoom actions, each successive zoom level introduces distortion into the image, to the point where zooms greater than 8X introduce enough distortion to make the image generally unusable. EZCamera supports a digital zoom up to 8X.

Some, but not all. cameras provide a built-in zoom. For those cameras, EZCamera can send a message to the camera to use its built-in zoom.

The EZCamera digital zoom is imposed on top of whatever zoom the camera provides, so if a camera provides internal zoom then EZCamera can combine the result to provide much larger zoom factors.

 Resolution

By default, EZCamera uses a 1920x1080 resolution, which typically fills the entire computer screen.

However, on occasion a user might wish to expose some of the computer desktop that is normally hidden by EZCamera. For that case, EZCamera can also be displayed in an 1280x720 window, which exposes about half of the desktop.

The keyboard key "R" will toggle between the two resolutions.

The EZCamera screen can be dragged to a new location. To drag, press and hold the left mouse along the top edge of the window and drag the window to the new location. The keyboard key "J" will restore the screen to a centered position.

Thank you for considering EZCamera and EZReader!