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."

Comments

why not braile output?

[DaCool42]

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.

Re:why not braile output?

[alphakappa]

A device that would produce braille output on a surface would be much more expensive than one that had to simply convert words to spoken voice (using one of the many excellent text-to-speech technologies available today). Also, where's the lack of privacy when you are using headphones :-)

Re:why not braile output?

[jfmiller]

Braile is not necessarly always the best solution. First a large number of vision impaired people never learn it, esp those that go blind late in life. Second while braile can be read as fast as typed print, it takes a good deal of space. This device is too small for a good surface.

As a side note, my supervisor is blind and has a device like this of the desktop varity. He can "read" about 300 words per minute, and be doing other things at the same time. I have fine vision but the though of being able to listen to my textbooks while doing the dishes almost justifies the $2500 price tag.

JFMILLER

Re:why not braile output?

[hooeezit]

This is a common misconception that Braille is the easiest form of presentation for the visually impaired. But that is not so.

Mind you, I use the word 'visually impaired', and not 'blind' for a good reason. A large proportion of the people considered legally blind do have some vision - they fall into the category called 'Low Vision'. There are about 2 million people in the US at present who have Low Vision, but number will swell significantly as the baby boomers age into 50+. Most visual impairments are actually age related, and when you've had vision till age 55 and you suddenly lose it in 6 months, it's a very disturbing experience. Most people who undergo that experience either do not have the ability to or don't care about learning tactile braille at that stage. Even as of now, only a fraction of the visually impaired population can actually read braille.

Also, as the other poster mentions, braille devices are extremely expensive, require a lot of power and are bulky (both in size and weight). A braille display with 40 braille cells will cost an additional $2500.

All that said, I should also mention that building a purely verbal user interface for 'describing' things is a very challenging task. I've been working the last 2 years on a similar device but purely for addressing navigation issues for the visually impaired. We already have a prototype device that can read special barcodes at a distance of about 6 feet, and then that barcode can be looked up in a database to determine the user's location. But how to describe their current location in a manner relevant to their task is proving to be a very tricky problem to solve. Every few months, we feel that we are very close and then discover one more issue that sets us back another few months.

So, it's encouraging to see that someone has been successfully able to build a verbal only interface for descriptive tasks.

- Rudrava Roy
Minnesota Laboratory for Low Vision Research
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Awkward!

[andrewman327]

This has just made your commute to work that much more awkward when the blind gentleman next to you pulls out a Playboy.