Wired reporter sandy ong highlights the work of prof.
Finger reader for visually impaired.
Liu pattie maes and suranga nanayakkara.
Victor reader stream is an essential device that allows visually impaired people to listen to audiobooks.
Roy shilkrot jochen huber connie k.
39 million are blind and 246 million have low vision severe or moderate visual impairment.
Who about 285 million people are visually impaired worldwide.
Right now the only solution is disabling the touch recognition component of the device.
Suranga nanayakkara who as a postdoc at mit helped develop the finger reader a device aimed at helping people with visual impairments read without the need for clunky hardware.
Keeping everything on fingerreader the same the user s finger is likely to disrupt the movable text.
Unlike other common ocr optical character recognition apps that first scan and then process the page the mit device dubbed the finger reader reads text in real time.
Chronic diseases un operated cataract and uncorrected refractive errors are the main causes of visual impairments.
In march 2015 the massachusetts institute of technology mit announced that researchers in its media lab had developed a prototype of a reading device that is worn on the finger.
Many people in the accessibility community were very excited by this prospect.
Unlike other devices for the visually impaired vi which scan words in chunks before vocalizing them fingerreader picks up words immediately.
While acknowledging this is a serious problem in the world through many kinds of research various solutions are being made to aid the visually impaired people.
So basically what is a finger reader.
In proceedings of chi 14 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems chi ea 14 video showcase p.
Finger reader is a device that assists visually impaired users with reading texts or words.
A wearable text reading device for the visually impaired.
It works by storing a variety of audio files whereby audiobooks are one of them.