A reading machine is a piece of assistive technology that allows blind people to access printed materials. It scans text, converts the image into text by means of optical character recognition and uses a speech synthesizer to read out what it has found.
The first successful prototypes of reading machine were developed at Haskins Laboratories in the 1970s under contract from the Veterans Administration. These large prototypes sent the output from a fixed-font optical character recognizer (OCR) to the input of synthesis-by-rule algorithms developed at Haskins Laboratories.
The first commercial reading machine for the blind was developed by Kurzweil Computer Products (later acquired by Xerox Corporation.) in 1975. Walter Cronkite used this machine to give his signature soundoff, "And that's the way it is, January 13, 1976."
Early reading machines were desk-based and large, found in libraries, schools and hospitals or owned by wealthy individuals. In 2009 a cellphone running Kurzweil-NFB software works as a reading machine.
Famous quotes containing the words reading and/or machine:
“There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading ... may be given without first getting the author’s permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“The momentary charge at Balaklava, in obedience to a blundering command, proving what a perfect machine the soldier is, has, properly enough, been celebrated by a poet laureate; but the steady, and for the most part successful, charge of this man, for some years, against the legions of Slavery, in obedience to an infinitely higher command, is as much more memorable than that as an intelligent and conscientious man is superior to a machine. Do you think that that will go unsung?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)