Form design for high accuracy optical character recognition

To successfully apply character recognition technology most of the forms currently hand-keyed will need to be redesigned. This paper presents results from a comprehensive study of three versions of a redesigned tax form. Analyses show that using separately spaced character boxes provides superior machine readability over fields containing combs and adjoining character boxes. It is shown that character boxes containing two vertically stacked ovals cause writers much more difficulty. Analyses provide proof that writer idiosyncratic responses on forms are the major source of errors, and proper form design can reduce these errors.