How would you read letters and numbers off of the actual screen?

[JeffThomas]

This may seem like a question that doesn't deserve to be in the advanced section but here goes.

How would you go about creating a program that can read/interpret something that is on your screen.

For Example: If I wanted to make a program read the java forums slogan, located around the top left corner of this page ( "where learning and development begins").

Would it be possible to get that image data as a string so that I can use it in if statements and such?
I already have some ideas about doing this but they aren't really optimal.

[doWhile]

Google 'Optical Character Recognition'. You will see this problem is a lot more difficult than you may think. There are a few libraries out there that might help, but they are based upon machine learning algorithms that must be trained (and as a result may not always be correct depending upon the training and the input)

[JeffThomas]

Thanks for the info. In the past I've tried to do stupid and tedious work of gathering pixel locations, getting buffered images, drawing rectangles around certain portions of the screen, and didn't really get anywhere.
This topic what just the kind of thing I was looking for.