“There is a fortuitous match between the capabilities of contemporary computers and the needs of a disabled person.” — Raymond Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, 1999
Assistive technology for the visually impaired market has been segmented into educational devices, mobility devices, low vision devices and others. The educational devices can be further classified into varying types and products-Braille duplicators and writers, Braille computers, mathematical and science devices, reading machines etc. In January of this year, the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first commercial reading machine capable of translating printed material into spoken words, celebrated it’s 43rd year anniversary. It was unveiled in 1976 by inventor Raymond Kurzweil along with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) in the United States. When he was a high school student in 1965, Raymond appeared on Steve Allen’s “I’ve got a secret” television show when he already invented a computer capable of composing music. Since then, Kurzweil has continued breaking technology’s barriers.
It was in the year 1975 that he made a pioneering move in the domain of educational devices for visually impaired people. Then, computer programs that could recognize printed letters, called optical character recognition (OCR), were capable of handling only one or two specialized type styles. Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products Inc. that year to develop the first OCR program that could recognize any style of print, which they succeeded in doing. So the question then became, “What is it good for?”. Like a lot of clever computer software, it was a solution in search of a problem. On a flight, Ray Kurzweil was sitting next to a blind gentleman and he explained to Ray that the only real handicap that he experienced was his inability to read ordinary printed material. A lightbulb went off in Ray’s head then-The man’s visual disability imparted no real handicap in either communicating or travelling, it was in reading. This was the problem that Ray’s software could solve. He deduced that his omni-font OCR technology could be applied to overcome this principal handicap. Overcoming the handicaps associated with disabilities using AI technologies had long been a personal goal of Kurzweil’s. Allow me to remind you that none of the ubiquitous scanners or text-to-speech synthesizers that are so readily available today, were non-existent then. So Ray’s team had to create these technologies from scratch, and after much blood, sweat and tears, they put together three new technologies that they had invented-omni-font OCR, Charge Coupled Device (CCD) flat-bed scanners, and text-to-speech synthesis to create the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. The Kurzweil Reading Machine (KRM) was able to read ordinary books, magazines and other printed documents out loud so now a blind person could read anything he wanted. Ray was a trailblazer of sorts, for the emergence of optical character recognition being used in the development of Braille educational software.
It continues to be one of the best integrable solutions to a problem that still largely looms over us-education for blind people. Despite the technological leaps that the world has experienced over the past few decades, educational assistive technology for the visually impaired has not experienced a boom, which is surprising when considering the seriousness of the problem. It is with a knowledge of the needs of the disabled, and taking inspiration from the solutions that have come before (like The Kurzweil Machine), that we must proceed with an urgency to come up with innovative and affordable results. In all essence, Raymond Kurzweil’s invention truly opened a wave of inventions in the field of assistive technology. This is what we’re calling “The Kurzweil Effect”.
Budding entrepreneurs and new-age assistive technology companies have to keep the fire burning and keep the spirit of invention alive. Constant invention and evolution is the way we can hope to achieve as well as live in a better tomorrow.
