Jonathan Mosen, who has been blind since
birth, spent his evening snapping photos of packages in the mail, his
son’s school report and labels on bottles in the fridge. In seconds, he
was listening to audio of the printed words the camera captured,
courtesy of a new app on his Apple Inc iPhone.
“I couldn’t believe how accurate it was,” said Mosen, an assistive technology consultant from New Zealand.
The new app that allows people who are
blind to listen to an audio readback of printed text is receiving rave
reviews after its first day of availability and is being heralded as a
life-changer by many people.
People with vision disabilities 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 US$99 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 Googleemployee.
According to its website, K-NFB Reading
Technology Inc and Sensotec NV, a Belgium-based company, led the
technical development of the app.
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.
The app has already given some people
greater independence, users said on Thursday and Friday on social-media
sites such as Twitter.
One early adopter, Gordon Luke, tweeted that he was able to use the app to read his polling card for the Scottish Referendum.
The app will be available on Android in
the coming months, Kurzweil told Reuters in an interview. He may also
explore a version of the app for Google Glass, a postage stamp-sized
computer screen that attaches to eyeglass frames and is capable of
taking photos, recording video and playing sound.
“Google Glass makes sense because you direct the camera with your head,” Kurzweil said.
Kurzweil started working on so-called
“reading machines” in the early 1970s after chatting on a plane with a
blind person who voiced frustrations with the lack of
optical-recognition technology on the market.
A few years later, “Kurzweil burst into
the National Federation of the Blind’s offices in Washington, DC, and
said he had invented a reading machine,” recalled Jim Gashel, a former
NFB employee who currently heads business development at KNFB Reader.
“It was phenomenal.”
Kurzweil’s first reading machine was the size of a washing machine and cost $50,000.
The technology has continued to improve
over the past few decades — the new smartphone app can recognize and
translate print between different languages and scan PowerPoint slides
up to 7.6m away — but it was not available on a mainstream mobile device
until now.
Previously, it cost more than US$1,000 to use the software with a Nokia cell phone and a camera.
San Francisco-based Bryan Bashin,
executive director of the non-profit Lighthouse for the Blind and
Visually Impaired, said the KNFB app shows the positive and profound
impact that technology can have.
“There are innumerable times in life
that I’ll have a bit of print and there will be nobody around who can
help me out, and I’ll just want to know something as simple as ‘Is this
packet decaf or caffeinated coffee?’” Bashin said.
“The ability to do this easily with something that fits in your pocket at lightning speed will certainly be a game changer.”
Source : Global Accessibility News , 22nd Sep 2014
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