A user of a camera equipped communication terminal is aided by the use of the invention when, e.g., dialing a phone number, sending a message to a recipient associated with the phone number, or simply store the phone number in a contact database in the terminal. The camera is pointed in the direction of a surface on which a sequence of symbols presumed to be a telephone number is written. The field of view is aimed using the guiding pattern and, e.g. by pressing a button or selecting an action from a menu, the symbol sequence is recorded in an image. The image, i.e. a sub-image containing the sequence of symbols, is then subjected to optical character recognition (OCR) processing that interprets the sequence of symbols as a telephone number to be used in an application that performs the dialing, message sending or storage into the contact database.