From Commercialization To Discontinuance
The Optacon was manufactured and marketed from 1971 to 1996 by Telesensory Systems Inc. of Silicon Valley, California. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the Optacon underwent upgrades, including the development of a new model, known as the Optacon II, which featured improved capabilities to interface to a computer.
As the Optacon project progressed and more obstacles and unknowns were overcome, the importance of making the Optacon generally available was apparent. TeleSensory's initial sales were to provide Optacons for test evaluations for the U.S. Office of Education, St. Dunstan's for blinded veterans in London, England, the Berufsbildungswerk in Heidelberg, Germany, and Sweden. The success of these evaluations led to larger dissemination programs funded by the U.S. Department of Education, private U.S. foundations such as Melen and Pew, state Departments of Rehabilitation, and various programs in many countries around the world such as Japan, Italy, Germany, France, and Scandinavia. The number of Optacons purchased privately by individuals was small. Approximately 15,000 Optacons were eventually sold.
Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the Optacon underwent upgrades, and various accessories were added, including different lens modules to be used with the camera for reading text in a typewriter and on computer and calculator screens. In 1985 Canon Inc. and Telesensory cooperated in the development of the Optacon II, which featured improved packaging and capabilities to interface to a computer (See Fig. 3).
The design decision to reduce the number of image pixels from 144 to 100 to lower cost resulted in Optacon II not being successful.
In the 1990s Telesensory increasingly shifted its emphasis toward the low-vision market and became less devoted to the Optacon. Page scanners with optical character recognition had come to be the tool of choice for blind people wanting access to print. Page scanners were less expensive and had a much shallower learning curve than the Optacon. In addition, blind people could generally read through material more quickly with a page scanner than with an Optacon.
In 1996 Telesensory announced that it would no longer manufacture the Optacon and that it would cease to service the device in 2000. Many users purchased used machines and cannibalized them for parts, presumably with much help from sighted, electromechanically-talented friends. In March 2005, TSI suddenly shut down. Employees were "walked out" of the building and lost accrued vacation time, medical insurance, and all benefits. Customers could not buy new machines or get existing machines fixed. Some work was done by other companies to develop an updated version of the Optacon to reduce the cost of the device and take advantage of newer technology, but no device with the versatility of the Optacon had been developed as of 2007.
Many blind people continue to use their Optacons to this day. The Optacon offers capabilities that no other device offers including the ability to see a printed page or computer screen as it truly appears including drawings, typefaces, and specialized text layouts.
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