WSJ.com - The Mossberg Solution

WSJ.com - The Mossberg Solution: "For the blind and visually impaired, technology has been helpful in many ways. Software can dictate the text on a computer screen, and advancements in voice recognition have made it possible to navigate a computer more easily.

But, for reading printed documents, like magazines, menus and mail, many blind and visually impaired people must still rely on other people to read to them, or must use large, deskbound reading machines that do nothing to allow reading while on the go. These dependencies are affecting more and more people, as aging Boomers confront diseases like macular degeneration and the effects of diabetes on eyesight.
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The $3,495 Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader takes digital pictures of text and reads them out loud. www.knfbreader.com.

Starting this month, there's a new portable gadget for the blind that permits them to 'read' printed documents anywhere, at home or away, without the aid of sighted people. This gadget takes a digital picture of a page of text, and then reads it aloud to the blind person, either through a speaker or through earphones. It's called the Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader, and we've been testing it."...