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:
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist’s hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.”
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959)