The K-NFB Reader (an acronym for Kurzweil — National Federation of the Blind Reader) is a handheld electronic reading device for the blind. It was developed in a partnership between

Ray Kurzweil Raymond Kurzweil ( ; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and e ...

and

National Federation of the Blind The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) is an organization of blind people in the United States. It is the oldest and largest organization led by blind people in the United States. Its national headquarters are in Baltimore, Maryland. Overvie ...

. The original version of the reader was composed of a

digital camera A digital camera is a camera that captures photographs in digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film. Digital cameras are now widely incorporated into mobile device ...

and a

PDA PDA may refer to: Science and technology * Patron-driven acquisition, a mechanism for libraries to purchase books *Personal digital assistant, a mobile device * Photodiode array, a type of detector * Polydiacetylenes, a family of conducting poly ...

, which contained specialised OCR software and

speech synthesizers Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...

to read the scanned material aloud. It was released at a price of $3,495. The software was later ported to the

Symbian Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system A mobile operating system is an operating system for mobile phones, tablets, smartwatches, smartglasses, or other non-laptop personal mobile computing devices. While computers such as typic ...

operating system, to be used on

Nokia N82 The Nokia N82 is a high-end smartphone produced by Nokia, and announced on 14 November 2007 as part of the company's Nseries line. The N82 runs Symbian OS v9.2 ( S60 3rd Edition, FP1). The N82 inherits much of the Nokia N95's features and speci ...

camera phone A camera phone is a mobile phone which is able to capture photographs and often record video using one or more built-in digital cameras. It can also send the resulting image wirelessly and conveniently. The first commercial phone with color cam ...

s, with a new price of $1,595. Developed by the National Federation of the Blind and Sensotec NV in 2014, an

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

port was released at a price of $99. An Android version was released shortly after. KNFB Reader can read: * Receipts * Package labels and mail * Product and nutritional information * Print on your computer or tablet screen * Longer documents such as books and user manuals * Private documents such as tax materials, mortgage documents, bills, and medical reports * Ebooks and documents in the

ePub EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for ''electronic publication'' and is sometimes styled ''ePub''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smartphones ...

format * Documents in more than thirty languages

Innovative Features

* Text Detection (shows you where there is print to capture) * Tilt and Viewfinder Assist (ensures you capture the entire page) * Text Highlighting (pinpoints text for dyslexic and other print-disabled users)

References

External links

Official site
Blindness equipment {{Compu-hardware-stub

Innovative Features

See also

References

External links