[Nfbf-l] KNFB New app that helps the blind see thanks to National Federation of the Blind and Ray Kurzweil

[Alan Dicey]

Dear Friends,

I imagine some of this information might have been posted before, but I 
never saw this particular article till today.

Hope some enjoy it, it mentions one of my favorite people, Ray Kurzweil.

With Best Regards,

God Bless,

Alan

Plantation, Florida

 Please join me on
www.nfblive.org
where through learning, friendship, activities, and growth, together "we can 
live the life we want."



San Francisco - Jonathan Mosen, who has been blind since birth, spent his 
evening snapping photos of packages in the mail, his son's school report and 
labels on bottles in the fridge. In seconds, he was listening to audio of 
the printed words the camera captured, courtesy of a new app on his Apple 
iPhone.



"I couldn't believe how accurate it was," said Mosen, an assistive 
technology consultant from New Zealand.



The new app that allows blind people to listen to an audio readback of 
printed text is receiving rave reviews after its first day of availability 
and is being heralded as a life-changer by many people.



Blind people say the KNFB Reader app will enable a new level of engagement 
in everyday life, from reading menus in restaurants to browsing handouts in 
the classroom.



The $99 app is the result of a four decades-long relationship between the 
National Federation of the Blind and Ray Kurzweil, a well-known 
artificial-intelligence scientist and senior Google employee. According to 
its website, K-NFB Reading Technology and Sensotec, a Belgium-based company, 
led the technical development of the app.



Kurzweil, who demonstrated the app on stage at the NFB's annual convention 
in June, said it can replace a "sighted adviser".



Taking advantage of new pattern recognition and image-processing technology 
as well as new smartphone hardware, the app allows users to adjust or tilt 
the camera, and reads printed materials out loud. People with refreshable 
Braille displays can now snap pictures of print documents and display them 
in Braille near-instantaneously, said NFB spokesperson Chris Danielsen.



The app has already given some people greater independence, users said on 
Thursday and Friday on social-media sites such as Twitter. One early 
adopter, Gordon Luke, tweeted that he was able to use the app to read his 
polling card for the Scottish Referendum.



The app will be available on Android in the coming months, Kurzweil told 
Reuters in an interview. He may also explore a version of the app for Google 
Glass, a postage stamp-sized computer screen that attaches to eyeglass 
frames and is capable of taking photos, recording video and playing sound.



Size of a washing machine



"Google Glass makes sense because you direct the camera with your head," 
Kurzweil said.



Kurzweil started working on so-called "reading machines" in the early 1970s 
after chatting on a plane with a blind person who voiced frustrations with 
the lack of optical-recognition technology on the market.



A few years later, "Kurzweil burst into the National Federation of the 
Blind's offices in Washington, DC, and said he had invented a reading 
machine," recalled Jim Gashel, a former NFB employee who currently heads 
business development at KNFB Reader. "It was phenomenal."



Kurzweil's first reading machine was the size of a washing machine and cost 
$50 000. The technology has continued to improve over the past few decades - 
the new smartphone app can recognise and translate print between different 
languages and scan PowerPoint slides up to 25 feet (7.6 meters) away - but 
it was not available on a mainstream mobile device until now.



Previously, it cost more than $1 000 to use the software with a Nokia 
cellphone and a camera.



The app's release comes at a time when the technology industry has faced 
criticism for being too focused on making what some deem frivolous products 
such as apps for sharing photos and video games, as well as for intruding 
into people's personal privacy.



In San Francisco, activists have blocked commuter buses operated by 
companies such as Google and Apple, and picketed the homes of some tech 
company executives for driving up the cost of living and not doing enough to 
help fix the city's problems.



San Francisco-based Bryan Bashin, executive director of the non-profit 
Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, said the KNFB app shows the 
positive and profound impact that technology can have.



"There are innumerable times in life that I'll have a bit of print and there 
will be nobody around who can help me out, and I'll just want to know 
something as simple as 'Is this packet decaf or caffeinated coffee?'" Bashin 
said.



"The ability to do this easily with something that fits in your pocket at 
lightning speed will certainly be a game changer."












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