A reading machine is a piece of

assistive technology Assistive technology (AT) is a term for assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices for people with disabilities and the elderly. Disabled people often have difficulty performing activities of daily living (ADLs) independently, or even with ...

that allows blind people to access printed materials. It scans text, converts the image into text by means of

optical character recognition Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scen ...

and uses a

speech synthesizer 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 out what it has found.

Development

The first prototype of reading machine, called

optophone The optophone is a device, used by the blind, that scans text and generates time-varying chords of tones to identify letters. It is one of the earliest known applications of sonification. Dr. Edmund Fournier d'Albe of Birmingham University invente ...

, was developed by Dr. Edmund Fournier d'Albe of Birmingham University in 1913. Five vertically-aligned photo-detectors were used to scan a line of printed text. Each cell generated a different tone (G, C, D, E, G8) when detecting black print, so that each character was associated with a specific time-varying chords of tones. With some practice, blind users were able to interpret this audio output as a meaningful message. However, the reading speed of this device was very slow (approximately one word per minute). From 1944 until up to the 1970s, new prototypes of reading machine were developed at

Haskins Laboratories Haskins Laboratories, Inc. is an independent 501(c) non-profit corporation, founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut, since 1970. Haskins has formal affiliation agreements with both Yale University and the University of Connecticut; ...

under contract from the

Veterans Administration The United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is a Cabinet-level executive branch department of the federal government charged with providing life-long healthcare services to eligible military veterans at the 170 VA medical centers a ...

. The research project was conducted by

Caryl Parker Haskins Caryl Parker Haskins (1908–2001) was an American scientist, author, inventor, philanthropist, governmental adviser and pioneering entomologist in the study of ant biology. Along with Franklin S. Cooper, he founded the Haskins Laboratories, ...

Franklin S. Cooper Franklin Seaney Cooper (April 29, 1908 – February 20, 1999) was an American physicist and American inventor, inventor who was a pioneer in speech researc Biography He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinoi ...

and

Alvin Liberman Alvin Meyer Liberman (; May 10, 1917 – January 13, 2000) was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. Liberman was an American psychologist. His ideas set the agenda for fifty years of psychological research in speech perception. Biography Liberman rece ...

. Their first attempts to improve the optophone all ended in failures, and users were still unable to read more than 5 words per minutes in average, even after long training sessions. This observation led Alvin Liberman to suppose that the limitation was cognitive rather than technical, and to formulate his

Motor theory of speech perception The motor theory of speech perception is the hypothesis that people perceive spoken words by identifying the vocal tract gestures with which they are pronounced rather than by identifying the sound patterns that speech generates. It originally cl ...

. He realized that the speech signal was not heard like an acoustic "alphabet" or "cipher," but as a "code" of overlapping speech gestures, due to coarticulation. Therefore, a reading machine cannot simply convert the printed characters into a series of abstract sounds, rather it must be able to identify the characters and to produce a speech sound as output using a

. The first commercial reading machine for the blind was developed by Kurzweil Computer Products (later acquired by

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (ha ...

Corporation) in 1975.

Walter Cronkite Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. (November 4, 1916 – July 17, 2009) was an American broadcast journalist who served as anchorman for the ''CBS Evening News'' for 19 years (1962–1981). During the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the mo ...

used this machine to give his signature soundoff, "And that's the way it is, January 13, 1976." In the mid-1960s, Francis F. Lee joined Dr. Samuel Jefferson Mason's Cognitive Information Processing Group in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

to work on a reading machine for the blind, the first system that would scan text and produce continuous speech. Early reading machines were desk-based and large, found in libraries, schools, and hospitals or owned by wealthy individuals. In 2009, a cellphone running Kurzweil- NFB software works as a reading machine.{{Cite web , url=http://www.knfbreader.com/products-mobile.php , title=KNFB Reader - Mobile Products , access-date=2010-10-19 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100815094216/http://www.knfbreader.com/products-mobile.php , archive-date=2010-08-15 , url-status=dead

References

Assistive technology Blindness equipment