Hello.

I am Paul Kinlan.

A Developer Advocate for Chrome and the Open Web at Google.

I love the web. The web should allow anyone to access any experience that they need without the need for native install or content walled garden.

Idle observation: Indexing text in images

Paul Kinlan

During a trip to Llangollen, I noticed that the historical information on local signs wasn't available online. This sparked an idea to make such information accessible on the web, especially for those with reading difficulties. I experimented with my existing image text extraction tool and found it works surprisingly well on these types of images. I'm now considering creating a website dedicated to archiving and indexing the text from informational signs, inspired by Google's Navlekhā project which helps offline Indian publishers digitize their content.

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Extracting text from an image: Experiments with Shape Detection

Paul Kinlan

I built a Progressive Web App (PWA) that extracts text from images shared to it. It uses the Share Target API to receive images, the Shape Detection API's TextDetector to analyze them, and EXIF-Js to handle image rotation issues. While it's a handy tool, it currently suffers from cross-browser and cross-version compatibility problems due to the lumpy nature of the web platform. The code snippets highlight key implementation details, like manifest setup, service worker handling, text extraction, and image rotation.

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