@lain yes, the iphone ocr is very good from what I've heard. Hopefully tesseract (FOSS OCR) gets to that point eventually. Text to speech is another area where FOSS isn't that great - a pity because I think it would be great to have books read to you.
@billiam i think not many people realize how far FOSS systems lag behind google and apple when it comes to accessibility, and not just in ways that can be solved by everyone putting semantic tags in their html.
@lain while disabled people (blind, heavily dyslexic, etc) benefit from these techs the most on an individual level, general society can also benefit from the tech significantly.
Being able to have PDFs, emails, etc read to you while you mundane tasks would be a solid benefit for many people