OK... so had a quick scooch on the debian package lists - it turned up a few things:
- tesseract. v3 (Sept 2010) is now on code.google The package on the debian site has dependencies that aren't armel compatible but that doesn't mean to say the code couldn't be compiled for armv7 though. Equally, it might not be possible.
- gocr. Looks less complete compared with tesseract but might be easier to get working with less depends.

It might be that many ocr programmes need to be run in a desktop environment so even if they can be compiled for armv7, it's only half the battle. Perhaps running it in ED might work?

There may be other foss projects that could be made to work on armv7...

Also, if TMO user jrocha reads this, please let us know how progress is on your OCR project.