Legends and Pioneers of Blindness Assistive Technology, Part 3
By Candela, Anthony R.; Access World, Vol. 7, No. 6Publication Date: November 2006
Article is the third in a series on the history of assistive technology for people with visual disabilities. Focus is on (1) the development of imaging technologies leading up to products such as HumanWare’s myReader, a system that captures a page, analyzes it and reformats the text to fit across the width of a screen; (2) the development of tactile technologies, tracing the history of Braille from its French inventor and his influences through the invention of braille printers to computer-based braille embossing such as the Mountbatten Brailler and piezo-electric cells, tactile braille cells made of materials that respond to electric current by changing their dimensions; (3) the development of speech synthesis, from the 1936 “voder,” the first electronic speech synthesizer, through the development of automatic text-to-speech conversion exemplified by the VERT (Voice Emulation in Real Time), to today’s software and high-capacity speech boards; (4) the development of reading machines, from post-WWII models such as the A2 and Battelle readers, through the Optacon, a reading machine converting print into a scrolling tactile output, to the Kurzweil OCR (optical character recognition) systems which recognize all fonts and compensate for printing errors.
Assistive Products Discussed: MOUNTBATTEN WRITER
KURZWEIL 1000
KURZWEIL READING MACHINE
PC VERT
OPTACON II
MYREADER
KURZWEIL - NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND READER
Published by: AFB Press (Website:http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=46)
American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) (Web Site: http://www.afb.org )
Link to text: http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw070609
