Technology
In 1977 NFB directed the final field trials of the first reading machine, developed by Kurzweil. The machine weighed 80 lb and cost US$50,000 the machine used 50 bits per word and could store 750,000 bits of information. It used a camera to scan 15 characters per second and was programed with the rules that govern spoken English. From this it produced the word with a synthetic voice.
NFB has partnered with Kurzweil Educational Systems, a company founded by noted inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, to develop a completely portable reading machine: the Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader. A digital camera takes a picture of the printed material to be read, and an attached personal digital assistant (PDA) reads the text aloud. The text is also stored as a text file, which can be saved and moved to a computer or portable notetaker so that it can be sent to a Braille embosser (sometimes called a Braille printer) or read on a paperless Braille display.
Read more about this topic: National Federation Of The Blind (United States)
Famous quotes containing the word technology:
“Radio put technology into storytelling and made it sick. TV killed it. Then you were locked into somebody else’s sighting of that story. You no longer had the benefit of making that picture for yourself, using your imagination. Storytelling brings back that humanness that we have lost with TV. You talk to children and they don’t hear you. They are television addicts. Mamas bring them home from the hospital and drag them up in front of the set and the great stare-out begins.”
—Jackie Torrence (b. 1944)
“If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamics that present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)