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Handheld Device Reads Printed Words to the Blind
geekotourist writes "3,000 people in Dallas this week for the National Federation of the Blind convention are getting a demonstration of what life is like when you can read printed menus, mail, business cards and memos," reports the Dallas Morning News. The NFB spent two million dollars developing the $3,495 Kurzweil-National Federation of
the Blind Reader, which weighs 15 ounces and combines text-to-speech with sophisticated OCR. The device 'gives the user an initial "situation report," describing what it can see. The user then makes a decision about whether to take a picture. After a few seconds to process the image, the contents of the document are read aloud.' Beta testers describe the joys of reading receipts, CDs, food labels, bulletin boards, conference printouts, or of simply reading books with privacy, without another person's help."
>You are driving on I-80. You are surrounded by cars. ...
>*turn wheel right*
>You have crashed your car. It is on fire.
>*Run away*
>I don't understand "away."
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Wouldn't braile output be better? It would allow for more privacy without the need for headphones, and I suspect most blind people could read it faster.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
I wonder what sort of camera resolution and processing power this requires. It would be great if in the near future something like this could be loaded onto an off-the-shelf cameraphone.
As far as current cameraphones go, (picking semi-randomly...) a Treo 700p has a 312MHz XScale processor, and a PPC-6700 has a 416 MHz XScale. Both have 1.3 megapixel cameras.
This has just made your commute to work that much more awkward when the blind gentleman next to you pulls out a Playboy.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
I wasn't aware that one blind reader constituted a federation.
</sarcasm>
I seriously had to read that two or three times before it came out right.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
It's probably be noted that the inventor/developer discussed in the article is Raymond Kurzweil, who's recently gotten a lot of press for his book about the technological singularity. Here's a brief blurb from the Wikipedia article about Kurzweil's inventions:
Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system.
As one who is sporadically losing her sight, I would find this very helpful, but do not, as of yet know braille, nor in the middle of medical procedures which may or may not improve the issue in the possible near future, have the time, energy or immediate need to add one more semi-difficult skill to the list of "Help! I'm overwhelmed".
BUT BOY! It would be a handy addition for the research I need right now.
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It simply wastes your time and truely annoys the pig"
The device "gives the user an initial 'situation report', describing what it can see.
"You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike."
The comparison is between a complex device made in the dozens, and a complex device made in the billions.
A braile display, which needs to display a line of text - a single changing character wouldn't work, as users slide fingers across the characters - is expensive to produce in the small numbers required.
A sound chip and headphones are used in every mp3 player, HPC and computer in existance. Probably ~50c in bulk amounts.
And as for speed: People who use file readers often have them set to run at 2x-4x speed. As long as the diction is good, it's easy to understand. Especially if you are used to it.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Great! Then you, too, can sell these for $3,495 a pop. Or maybe it's not quite the same thing, hmm? What's more likely?
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
How hard would it be to come up with a FOSS system to do the same thing? It sounds like the software makes up a good deal of the cost of the device -- with the proper patrons (like the NFB), perhaps you could come up with some system that would just cost as much as the hardware. I mean, heck, the NFB sunk $2 million into the project, and the blind will still have to pay $3500 for the device.
So you'd start with a good digital camera and a small handheld device. Then you need OCR -> text and text -> speech. What's the state of research or code that one could use in FOSS projects? It's been a year or so since I last checked, but AFAIK the current OCR software that's Free just doesn't stack up with that latest commercial products....
coding is life
Yes you have. I was in one of the news pieces that aired in Chicago where we presented the "original" technology called the iCare Reader (Link to video) This is a technology that was invented at Arizona State University a LONG time before Kurzwile ever dreamed about it. The research center called CUbiC has been working on developing devices for the blind since 2003. I personally helped develop the software for this and I can say we did it for a LOT LOT Less than 2 million.
Oh and not only that, we took 6 months to develop a product and deploy it to a few locations around Arizona.
This is just an example of the big corporation copying an idea and having the resources to mass produce it. We tried to get some disability companies involved in this but unfortunately they all fell through (I believe the original sale price after all the figures were crunched were around $1500 and it included an 8MP camera too).
Its sad but technology in the market these days for individuals who are blind are VASTLY overpriced. This is because most of this is subsidized by the government so they charge extra knowing that it will be covered by some organization with ties to the government. Not only does this stifle competition but it stifles creativity since the big companies have the the capital to market anything they want and since they have a virtual monopoly on this industry, they can charge whatever they like.
That said, I'd like to welcome our new blind overlords and remind them that I can be useful in rounding up some slaves.
A cell-phone for the blind was recently made available to visually impaired people in New Zealand, costing around $300USD. It seems like only a small step further to add some sort of camera/document scanner... This particular device will unquestionably help visually impaired students of particular sciences (e.g. advanced math), where there is almost no demand of Braille versions of textbooks (and even the regular textbooks!) and too many books to pay the conversion to Braille (here I believe it's at least $500?).
Wait a minute, it doesn't matter.
The first description of this idea - although not as a handheld- seems to have been made in 1934, where ' In his 1934 story The Lost Language, writer David H. Keller describes a device that is actually able to make speech from printed text--the sound-transposing machine.'
It sounds simpler than it is. Braille cell displays are extremely expensive today, unfortunately. an example of braille cell display pricing