gizmag.com— A groundbreaking new device has been announced by the United States National Federation of the Blind (NFB) - the Kurzweil-NFB Reader which enables users to take pictures of and read most printed materials.
Jun 27, 2006View in Crawl 4
On the matter of the price. As a user of Kurzweil 1000 software. An OCR based solution for visually impaired, I would have to agree with the previous posts on the price. On the "common" consumer electronic level this seems ridiculous. But, on the BLV (blind, low vision) end of things, it is dead center of the ball park for this kind of equipment. The software itself for your basic Wintel costs ~$1,200.00 US. Even more yet one must realize that this is equipment aimed at half of 1%. I.e. 1% of the world are visually impaired, (blind enough they would use this.) and even more yet only half of that uses a Latin based language that this system works with. Thus half of 1% market share.
mb96netJun 28, 2006
Wouldn't the next step be to add language translation to this and then people can "read" signs in different languages?
fussiliJun 28, 2006
ROFL. do they have sarcasm where you come from?
altgeneticsJun 29, 2006
On the matter of the price. As a user of Kurzweil 1000 software. An OCR based solution for visually impaired, I would have to agree with the previous posts on the price. On the "common" consumer electronic level this seems ridiculous. But, on the BLV (blind, low vision) end of things, it is dead center of the ball park for this kind of equipment. The software itself for your basic Wintel costs ~$1,200.00 US. Even more yet one must realize that this is equipment aimed at half of 1%. I.e. 1% of the world are visually impaired, (blind enough they would use this.) and even more yet only half of that uses a Latin based language that this system works with. Thus half of 1% market share.
prism92289Jun 29, 2006
Good news my cousin who is blind will benefit from this, I just don't know how we will foot the cost