The BYTE Hardware Poll

To test Teleform's capabilities, the BYTE Reviews department created a hypothetical poll in Teleform Designer, printed a master on a laser printer, made 93 copies, and distributed them to the members of the BYTE staff in Peterborough, New Hampshire. We faxed the 55 returned and completed forms to a test system (a generic clone with 16 MB of RAM and a 75-MHz IBM Blue Lightning processor) running Teleform. Later, the data from the same forms was also scanned in to the system.

The form that we designed used virtually all of Teleform's objects, something that's unlikely in the real world. We did, however, learn some valuable lessons about using Teleform.

For example, we did not create either a dictionary or a data-base lookup for the constrained or unconstrained handwritten text entry, and that caused problems in text recognition, especial ly when respondents did not pay attention to the printing examples (a predefined Teleform object) included at the top of the form. Because the universe of computer brand names and possible peripherals is relatively limited, giving Teleform a custom lookup table would have eliminated many manual corrections. Virtually every form needed some degree of manual correction, but that may have been a shortcoming of the form design.

On the other hand, Teleform was dead-accurate at recognizing ``fill in the box'' optical marks, including circles that were x-ed or checked instead of filled in. Also, recognition percentages went up when respondents followed the handprinting examples in the ``Example'' object model. Surprisingly, there was no discernible difference in accuracy between faxed and scanned forms.

Performance was unexpectedly fast on our test system, even taking into account that the machine was equipped with above the recommended minimum hardware. Once it received each form via fax or scanning, the Teleform Reader averaged 15 seconds to process and recognize the entered data, pausing occasionally when it encountered extensive unconstrained text in the Attached Peripherals box. The result of our test was a file in Paradox format, which we were then able to open in Paradox for Windows and use with no problems.