OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

A computer-vision technology that converts images of printed, handwritten, or on-screen text into machine-readable character data. OCR is foundational to a wide range of accessibility tools: extracting alt-text for image-based PDFs, reading labels for screen-reader users (e.g., Seeing AI, Be My Eyes), digitizing print materials for braille conversion, and — in UI-accessibility research — pulling the textual labels of buttons and icons from app screenshots. Modern OCR engines such as Tesseract and PaddleOCR combine detection and recognition in deep-learning pipelines.