An optical reader is a device found within most computer scanners that captures visual information and translates the image into digital information the computer is capable of understanding and displaying.
An example of optical readers are marksense systems for elections where voters mark their choice by filling a rectangle, circle or oval, or by completing an arrow. After the voting a tabulating device reads the votes using "dark mark logic", whereby the computer selects the darkest mark within a given set as the correct choice or vote.
Marksense is also used extensively in such areas as lotteries and multiple choice tests.
Famous quotes containing the words optical and/or reader:
“It is said that a carpenter building a summer hotel here ... declared that one very clear day he picked out a ship coming into Portland Harbor and could distinctly see that its cargo was West Indian rum. A county historian avers that it was probably an optical delusion, the result of looking so often through a glass in common use in those days.”
—For the State of New Hampshire, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“A cow does not know how much milk it has until the milkman starts working on it. Then it looks round in surprise and sees the pail full to the brim. In the same way a writer has no idea how much he has to say till his pen draws it out of him. Thoughts will then appear on the paper that he is amazed to find that he possessed. “How brilliant!” he says to himself. “I had no idea I was so intelligent.” But the reader may not be so im pressed.”
—Gerald Branan (1894–1987)