Handheld Device Reads Printed Words to the Blind 110
geekotourist writes "3,000 people in Dallas this week for the National Federation of the Blind convention are getting a demonstration of what life is like when you can read printed menus, mail, business cards and memos," reports the Dallas Morning News. The NFB spent two million dollars developing the $3,495 Kurzweil-National Federation of
the Blind Reader, which weighs 15 ounces and combines text-to-speech with sophisticated OCR. The device 'gives the user an initial "situation report," describing what it can see. The user then makes a decision about whether to take a picture. After a few seconds to process the image, the contents of the document are read aloud.' Beta testers describe the joys of reading receipts, CDs, food labels, bulletin boards, conference printouts, or of simply reading books with privacy, without another person's help."
Real-world Zork: (Score:4, Funny)
>*turn wheel right*
>You have crashed your car. It is on fire.
>*Run away*
>I don't understand "away."
Re:Real-world Zork: (Score:1, Funny)
why not braile output? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:why not braile output? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:why not braille* output? (Score:3, Interesting)
A braile display, which needs to display a line of text - a single changing character wouldn't work, as users slide fingers across the characters - is expensive to produce in the small numbers required.
A sound chip and headphones are used in every mp3 player, HPC and computer in existance. Probably ~50c in bulk amounts.
And as for speed: People who use file readers often have them set to run at 2x-4x spee
Re:why not braille* output? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:why not braile output? (Score:2)
Re:why not braile output? (Score:2)
I know the 24 pin head would be a bit small; but the theory would be the same. Just make a long pad (maybe 30 characters long?) with these things poking the surface enough to act like braille....
Re:why not braile output? (Score:2)
Also, have you ever looked at an entire dot-matrix print head? While the area where the pins meet to print is fairly small, the solenoid driver end is actually pretty large - typ
Re:why not braile output? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a side note, my supervisor is blind and has a device like this of the desktop varity. He can "read" about 300 words per minute, and be doing other things at the same time. I have fine vision but the though of being able to listen to my textbooks while doing the dishes almost justifies the $2500 price tag.
JFMILLER
Re:why not braile output? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:why not braile output? (Score:1)
Re:why not braile output? non-braile readers 'yet' (Score:2, Informative)
As one who is sporadically losing her sight, I would find this very helpful, but do not, as of yet know braille, nor in the middle of medical procedures which may or may not improve the issue in the possible near future, have the time, energy or immediate need to add one more semi-difficult skill to the list of "Help! I'm overwhelmed".
BUT BOY! It would be a handy addition for the research I need right now.
Regarding privacy (Score:1)
I have a friend who is extremely dyslexic, and thus can't really read. He loves walking down the street listening to books on tape, as it is his only chance to "read". How much more so for som
Re:why not braile output? (Score:5, Interesting)
Mind you, I use the word 'visually impaired', and not 'blind' for a good reason. A large proportion of the people considered legally blind do have some vision - they fall into the category called 'Low Vision'. There are about 2 million people in the US at present who have Low Vision, but number will swell significantly as the baby boomers age into 50+. Most visual impairments are actually age related, and when you've had vision till age 55 and you suddenly lose it in 6 months, it's a very disturbing experience. Most people who undergo that experience either do not have the ability to or don't care about learning tactile braille at that stage. Even as of now, only a fraction of the visually impaired population can actually read braille.
Also, as the other poster mentions, braille devices are extremely expensive, require a lot of power and are bulky (both in size and weight). A braille display with 40 braille cells will cost an additional $2500.
All that said, I should also mention that building a purely verbal user interface for 'describing' things is a very challenging task. I've been working the last 2 years on a similar device but purely for addressing navigation issues for the visually impaired. We already have a prototype device that can read special barcodes at a distance of about 6 feet, and then that barcode can be looked up in a database to determine the user's location. But how to describe their current location in a manner relevant to their task is proving to be a very tricky problem to solve. Every few months, we feel that we are very close and then discover one more issue that sets us back another few months.
So, it's encouraging to see that someone has been successfully able to build a verbal only interface for descriptive tasks.
- Rudrava Roy
Minnesota Laboratory for Low Vision Research
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Barcodes? (Score:2)
What do the barcodes offer that GPS does not? And if you are going to use something like barcodes why not rfid instead?
I can understand the logic of barcodes 10-20 years ago but in this day and age it sounds like a project that has been around to long and been surpassed by technology. Am I wrong?
Barcodes? Sure, why not? (Score:2)
Re:Barcodes? Sure, why not? (Score:2)
Re:Barcodes? Sure, why not? (Score:2)
Text/OCR device alignment? (Score:1)
I didn't read TFA, but isn't *some* sight required to perform alignment tasks?
Re:why not braile output? (Score:2)
I could look it up, but this sounds like something worth discussing: why are braille devices so large and expensive? Aren't they basically a bunch of little solenoids that poke rods up from a surface? Unless I'm missing something, a 40 character (same as cell, right?) device would need 2x3x40=240
Re:why not braile output? (Score:2)
To form the 2 x 3 cell pattern for a braille character, you have only a limited amount of space to put it in, because a single cell needs to fit in the area of a adult's fingertip, or about 1 cm^2. Furthermore, when the tips of the rods are pushed up, they need to stay up under the light pressure of the users fingers. It won't be great pressure, but it
Re:why not braile output? (Score:1)
Anyone who has not experience blindness really has
Re:why not braile output? (Score:1)
Re:why not braile output? (Score:1)
Re:why not braile output? (Score:2, Interesting)
How long until we see this on cameraphones? (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as current cameraphones go, (picking semi-randomly...) a Treo 700p has a 312MHz XScale processor, and a PPC-6700 has a 416 MHz XScale. Both have 1.3 megapixel cameras.
Re:How long until we see this on cameraphones? (Score:2)
Those are smartphones, not camera phones. Don't expect the average camera phone to have anywhere near that much CPU power.
Awkward! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Awkward! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Awkward! (Score:2)
Re:Awkward! (Score:3, Funny)
Soko
Re:Awkward! (Score:2)
Ok, I hope I'm not the only one reminded of David Cross's impression of Stephen Hawking having phone sex.
I wonder what the voice options are. Sign me up for Alice from the Brady Bunch.
Re:Awkward! (Score:2)
Re:Nice phone (Score:2, Funny)
National Federation of the Blind Reader? (Score:3, Funny)
I wasn't aware that one blind reader constituted a federation.
</sarcasm>
I seriously had to read that two or three times before it came out right.
-:sigma.SB
Inventor is Raymond Kurzweil, Singularity guy (Score:3, Informative)
Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system.
Re:Inventor is Raymond Kurzweil, Singularity guy (Score:3, Interesting)
He placed the head inside a grand piano and played - the effect was striking (no pun intended). He tapped and scratched the head and it sounded like he was doing it to my head. What a memory!
Re:Inventor is Raymond Kurzweil, Singularity guy (Score:3, Informative)
The 1975 reader cost $50,000 (over $150,000 in today's dollars) and was the size of a dishwasher. This new reader "is about a thousand times smaller than the original Kurzweil Reading Machine, the PDA in the portable Reader is two thousand times faster. In fact, the portable Reader can execute about 500 million instructions per second as compa
Re:Inventor is Raymond Kurzweil, Singularity guy (Score:1)
If you look at the numbers, {1975, $150000}, {2006, $3500}, you can extrapolate that COST = -4725.8*YEAR + 9483455 (roughly speaking). By next year, they'll be paying people around $1200 just to take them off their hands...
Re:Inventor is Raymond Kurzweil, Singularity guy (Score:1)
Re:Inventor is Raymond Kurzweil, Singularity guy (Score:1)
[HUMOR]
Didn't we have these? (Score:1)
Re:Didn't we have these? (Score:2, Informative)
Oh and not only that, we took 6 mon
Portable vs handheld- different (Score:1, Interesting)
it doesn't look like either of Kurzweil or the National Federation of the Blind are big corporations, or not even a small corporation. And since Kurzweil started working on readers in 1975, I think his dreams could have been big enough to see this coming. I
Ray Kurzweil started in 2002, or 1975... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Didn't we have these? (Score:1)
But the coolest movie machine is the one that types out Braille from the screen as seen in Sneakers (kinda old but still nice movie). PLUS that guy could crack encryption from his fingers IN HIS MIND.
Now the blind can play text adventures. (Score:3, Funny)
"You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike."
Re:Now the blind can play text adventures. (Score:2)
"You are standing in an open field west of a white house."
Okay, so the bar has been set... (Score:3, Interesting)
So you'd start with a good digital camera and a small handheld device. Then you need OCR -> text and text -> speech. What's the state of research or code that one could use in FOSS projects? It's been a year or so since I last checked, but AFAIK the current OCR software that's Free just doesn't stack up with that latest commercial products....
But for how long? (Score:1)
Re:But for how long? (Score:1)
I actually don't think it would be too hard to put together a FOSS version of this. OCR has been around for a long time now, and there are FOSS OCR packages available. Also, text-to-speech is nothing new and there are FOSS options for that as well. The only reason a device like this was not made before, either is FOSS or comercial versions, was that small, powerful hardware needed for a hand-held solution was not affordable. The software has been around for awhile, but today's small, afordable digital c
great for blind grad students (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:great for blind grad students (Score:1)
It looks stupid (Score:2, Funny)
Marketing Blows (Score:2)
I hate pricing like "3495". Why not suggest 3500? Especially for a big ticket item such as this. More reasonably, how about 20% over cost? (given its a medical item). Pick a number, and go with it. 3495?
I know -- those pricing tricks work... Oh well.
Ratboy
Re:Marketing Blows (Score:1)
What do you mean, I went over by a dollar?!?
I saw it (Score:2)
Come on governments, subsidise it (Score:1)
Re:Come on governments, subsidise it (Score:1)
That's right. Not only will private health insurance pay for these as medical devices, U.S. government health insurance, Medicaid, which most blind people qualify for because of their disability, will also pay for these. In addition, individuals can apply for government assistance through local vocational rehabilitation programs to pay for these. Plus, may public schools systems will be picking up the tab for these for their students.
So the high cost is caused precisely because these are ulimately paye
Japanese (Score:1)
Re:Japanese (Score:2)
have they really thought this through? (Score:2)
Won't somebody please think of the dogs?
Re:have they really thought this through? (Score:2)
"You are stood on a road."
"There is a car."
"There is a mangled body."
A dog will stop you wandering onto the road unless it's safe.
Re:have they really thought this through? (Score:1)
Re:have they really thought this through? (Score:2)
Re:have they really thought this through? (Score:1)
Hey that's my idea! (Score:1)
Porn? (Score:2)
"I see a blond babe, with huuuuuge...."
OT: With huuuuuge... (Score:2)
Money and anti-counterfeiting (Score:2)
Stevie Wonder (Score:2)
Anyone else remember this ad?
Re:Stevie Wonder (Score:1)
Your mention of Stevie Wonder brings up what I think is an interesting little factoid: he's the link that got Kurzweil into music synthesis. He was an early user of Kurzweil's reading machines, and at some point complained to Kurzweil about the state of music synthesis technology, which inspired the whole Kurzweil line of music synthesizers.
More details here: http://www.kurzweilai.net/bio [kurzweilai.net]
Very cool, but.... (Score:2)
Isn't this really old news? (Score:2)
I recall seeing little $100-ish devices in the catalog you get on airplanes that claim to read a word from paper, translates it into another language, and speaks it for you in that language. Why is something that only does a fraction of that somehow interesting? Because it is intended for use by visually impaired people instead of tourists?
*rolls eyes*
Re:Isn't this really old news? (Score:2)
Given this constraint, you now have a bigger problem on the software side: How much of the "material" to be "read" is visible? Are there letters and words on the paper? What if the media the words are written on is non-planar (ie, wrinkled reciept, curved or bent menu, etc)? What if the media has contrast issues (lighting, shinyness of laminate, etc)? What if the media to be read is presented
Couldn't they use a newer TTS voice? (Score:1)
Copyright (Score:2)
A use for an ebook device I'd not thought of (Score:2)
At risk of going even further offtopic, what would be the chances of makezining a cheap ebook device from parts? I only ask because this article causes me to think that its a cultural travesty that no one makes an open-spec ebook for less than a hundred bucks. We need reading devices for so many things; textbooks, saving paper, saving ou
Edge detection (Score:1)
Re:Why fucking bother with the God Damned blind (Score:1)
Re:Why fucking bother with the God Damned blind (Score:1)
Natural Selection = Reproduction (Score:2)
It does not matter if you have an IQ of 150+ or have 20/10 vision. In the end we are all less fit than Sultans with big harems and hundreds of children, or even many NBA players with dozens of children who have no talent beyond a good jump shot!
Can be pretty humbling. Which is good. Maybe us "intellectually fit" people need to reproduce more if we want