identifying text chars in an image

[Phil Davis]

I want to [programmatically] take a picture of a Scrabble board and then 
take from that image the characters displayed in it, and maintain the 
organization of the text. In other words, I want to convert the text 
displayed in the image to text strings.

Any ideas where I should start?

I would love to be able to do it in my app. However I'm not completely 
against uploading the image to a service that would do it for me; I am 
only mostly against it.

Thanks for any ideas to may have.

-- 
Phil Davis
503-307-4363