Optical character recognition (OCR) technology offers blind and visually impaired persons the capacity to scan printed text and then speak it back in synthetic speech or save it to a computer. Little technology exists to interpret graphics such as line art, photographs, and graphs into a medium easily accessible to blind and visually impaired persons. It also is not yet possible to convert handwriting, whether script or block printing, into an accessible medium. There are three essential elements to OCR technology -- scanning, recognition, and reading text. Initially, a printed document is scanned by a camera. OCR software then converts the images into recognized characters and words. The synthesizer in the OCR system then speaks the recognized text. Finally, the information is stored in an electronic form, either in a personal computer (PC) or the memory of the OCR system itself.