2014-09-25: Improving Accessibility of Archived Raster Dictionaries of Complex Script Languages

The Internet Archive (IA) and Open Library offer over 6 million fully accessible public domain eBooks. I searched for the term "dictionary" while I was casually browsing the scanned book collection to see how many dictionaries they have. I found several dictionaries in various languages. I randomly picked A Dictionary of the English Language (1828) - Samuel Johnson, John Walker, Robert S. Jameson from the search result. I opened the dictionary in fullscreen mode using IA's opensource online BookReader application . This book reader application has common tools for browsing an image based book such as flipping pages, seeking a page, zooming, and changing the layout. In the toolbar it has some interesting features like reading aloud and full-text searching. I wondered how could it possibly perform text searching and read aloud an scanned raster image based book? I sneaked inside the page source code which pointed me to some documentation pages. I realized it is using