An optical reader is a device found within most computer scanners that captures visual information and translates the image into digital information the computer is capable of understanding and displaying.
An example of optical readers are marksense systems for elections where voters mark their choice by filling a rectangle, circle or oval, or by completing an arrow. After the voting a tabulating device reads the votes using "dark mark logic", whereby the computer selects the darkest mark within a given set as the correct choice or vote.
Marksense is also used extensively in such areas as lotteries and multiple choice tests.
Famous quotes containing the words optical and/or reader:
“The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)