It's already a well-known fact that the blind have had quite a lot of problems over time regarding the access to written texts, since the number of books written in Braille is relatively small. However, this state of things might change due to the development of a the Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader, a device that lets blind persons "read" ordinary prints.

The device works on a very simple (yet technologically complex) principle. The Reader combines a state-of-the-art digital camera with the functionality of a PDA, on which the latest text recognition and text-to-speech software has been installed. It's also quite user-friendly, since all the user has to do is press a button, and then the image is captured, processed, and the text "spoken" by a synthetic voice.

Moreover, the scanned pages can be saved in the memory and accessed at any time, or ever transferred to other devices, specially developed for the persons with sight problems. In any case, if this device really is capable of reading most of the texts it scans, then it could prove to be a huge help for sightless persons, it's only major problem being the rather high price (around 3500 dollars).

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