KNFB Reader: New Smartphone App Heralded as Game-Changer for the Blind

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http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/knfb-reader-new-smartphone-app-heralded-game-changer-blind-n209091

A new smartphone app that allows blind people to listen to an audio readback of printed text is receiving rave reviews and is being heralded as a life-changer by many people. Blind people say the KNFB Reader app will enable a new level of engagement in everyday life, from reading menus in restaurants to browsing handouts in the classroom. The $99 iOS app is the result of a four decades-long relationship between the National Federation of the Blind and Ray Kurzweil, a well-known artificial-intelligence scientist and senior Google employee. Kurzweil, who demonstrated the app on stage at the NFB's annual convention in June, said it can replace a "sighted adviser."

Taking advantage of new pattern recognition and image- processing technology as well as new smartphone hardware, the app allows users to adjust or tilt the camera, and reads printed materials out loud. People with refreshable Braille displays can now snap pictures of print documents and display them in Braille near-instantaneously, said NFB spokesman Chris Danielsen.

Video at link. Amazing

Ray Kurzweil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil



In 1974, Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. and led development of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. Before that time, scanners had only been able to read text written in a few fonts. He decided that the best application of this technology would be to create a reading machine, which would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them aloud. However, this device required the invention of two enabling technologies—the CCD flatbed scanner and the text-to-speech synthesizer. Development of these technologies was completed at other institutions such as Bell Labs, and on January 13, 1976, the finished product was unveiled during a news conference headed by him and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind. Called the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the device covered an entire tabletop.

Kurzweil's next major business venture began in 1978, when Kurzweil Computer Products began selling a commercial version of the optical character recognition computer program. LexisNexis was one of the first customers, and bought the program to upload paper legal and news documents onto its nascent online databases.

[Harcourdt Fenton Mud]

1. Yes, this really is amazing!

I am totally blind and I downloaded this app after gladly paying the $99.99 price. It works as advertised.