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 machine, reading and/or machine:
“A reading machine, always wound up and going,
He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)
“Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)
“Much that is natural, to the will must yield.
Men manufacture both machine and soul,
And use what they imperfectly control
To dare a future from the taken routes.”
—Thom Gunn (b. 1929)