BrailleNote, a small computer about the size of a medium size hardcover book with a tactile display that allows me to electronically read and write in Braille with no monitor needed.
Another technological tool I use daily is a talking smart phone. I have software on my computer that operates a screen reader that verbalizes the information contained in documents, spreadsheets, and on Web sites. After years of practice, I can listen to and decipher the voice of my screen reader at hundreds of words a minute. The voice sounds a little like an auctioneer on speed, but it allows me to get through e-mail and documents quickly.
Just a couple of years ago, along came a game changer that enabled me to do something I never thought I’d be able to do— read my mail. Think about it. For a blind person to read mail, he has to ask a friend or hire an assistant to help read it. But now, thanks to the K-NFB Reader by Mobile Products, I can read any sort of print, whether menus, magazines, instructions, labels, recipes, or even junk mail. It works like this: using a cell phone, the user takes a photo of the print to be read and the character recognition software, in conjunction with high-quality text-to-speech, reads the contents of the document aloud.
The K-NFB Reader is the great-grandchild of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the world’s very first omni-font optical character recognition system. This remarkable machine was invented by Raymond Kurzweil, a futurist and inventor who came up with a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any font. Before that time, scanners had only been able to read text written in a very few standardized fonts.
Kurzweil had known he wanted to be an inventor since the age of six. While a student at MIT, he became interested in using computers for pattern recognition. His ideas were innovative but needed a real-world application.
One day Kurzweil was on an airplane and struck up a conversation with a blind man sitting next to him. He asked what type of technology would be most helpful in addressing a blind person’s needs. He expected the answer to be related to mobility. Instead, the man said the technology that would be the most helpful would be a device that could read print.
After that chance conversation, Kurzweil decided that the best application of his scanning technology would be to create a reading machine that would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them aloud.
My very first job out of college, in a remarkable stroke of luck, I got to work with Raymond “Ray” Kurzweil, now an internationally recognized inventor and futurist.
Ray first approached the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) with his idea for a reading machine back in 1974. They were skeptical at first, but after an eye-opening demonstration at the inventor’s laboratory on Rogers Road in Massachusetts where the reading machine read some of the materials the NFB brought, they began a working relationship. With Ray’s help, the NFB approached foundations for funding and purchased five machines, which were placed in various locations around the country for blind people to use. These were the prototypes and were about the size of an apartment-sized washing machine. The reading machine used a flatbed scanner and scanned just one line at a time. It took about thirty to forty-five seconds to scan an 81/2 x 11–inch page of text, then another minute or so to recognize the text and begin to read it out loud.
The first five machines were located at the Iowa Commission for the Blind; Blind Industries and Services of Maryland; the New York Public Library; the University of Colorado; and the Orientation Center for the Blind in Albany, California (later moved to the San Francisco Public Library).
These machines were just prototypes and needed the bugs worked out, so after graduation I was hired by the NFB to work with James Gashel, director of governmental affairs for the
Another technological tool I use daily is a talking smart phone. I have software on my computer that operates a screen reader that verbalizes the information contained in documents, spreadsheets, and on Web sites. After years of practice, I can listen to and decipher the voice of my screen reader at hundreds of words a minute. The voice sounds a little like an auctioneer on speed, but it allows me to get through e-mail and documents quickly.
Just a couple of years ago, along came a game changer that enabled me to do something I never thought I’d be able to do— read my mail. Think about it. For a blind person to read mail, he has to ask a friend or hire an assistant to help read it. But now, thanks to the K-NFB Reader by Mobile Products, I can read any sort of print, whether menus, magazines, instructions, labels, recipes, or even junk mail. It works like this: using a cell phone, the user takes a photo of the print to be read and the character recognition software, in conjunction with high-quality text-to-speech, reads the contents of the document aloud.
The K-NFB Reader is the great-grandchild of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the world’s very first omni-font optical character recognition system. This remarkable machine was invented by Raymond Kurzweil, a futurist and inventor who came up with a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any font. Before that time, scanners had only been able to read text written in a very few standardized fonts.
Kurzweil had known he wanted to be an inventor since the age of six. While a student at MIT, he became interested in using computers for pattern recognition. His ideas were innovative but needed a real-world application.
One day Kurzweil was on an airplane and struck up a conversation with a blind man sitting next to him. He asked what type of technology would be most helpful in addressing a blind person’s needs. He expected the answer to be related to mobility. Instead, the man said the technology that would be the most helpful would be a device that could read print.
After that chance conversation, Kurzweil decided that the best application of his scanning technology would be to create a reading machine that would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them aloud.
My very first job out of college, in a remarkable stroke of luck, I got to work with Raymond “Ray” Kurzweil, now an internationally recognized inventor and futurist.
Ray first approached the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) with his idea for a reading machine back in 1974. They were skeptical at first, but after an eye-opening demonstration at the inventor’s laboratory on Rogers Road in Massachusetts where the reading machine read some of the materials the NFB brought, they began a working relationship. With Ray’s help, the NFB approached foundations for funding and purchased five machines, which were placed in various locations around the country for blind people to use. These were the prototypes and were about the size of an apartment-sized washing machine. The reading machine used a flatbed scanner and scanned just one line at a time. It took about thirty to forty-five seconds to scan an 81/2 x 11–inch page of text, then another minute or so to recognize the text and begin to read it out loud.
The first five machines were located at the Iowa Commission for the Blind; Blind Industries and Services of Maryland; the New York Public Library; the University of Colorado; and the Orientation Center for the Blind in Albany, California (later moved to the San Francisco Public Library).
These machines were just prototypes and needed the bugs worked out, so after graduation I was hired by the NFB to work with James Gashel, director of governmental affairs for the
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