Optacon

A historical assistive device developed in the 1970s that enabled blind people to read printed text by converting visual images of letters into tactile vibration patterns felt with the fingertip. Users would move a small camera across printed text while their other hand rested on an array of vibrating pins that reproduced the letter shapes in real-time. While groundbreaking for its era, the Optacon required extensive training and had slow reading speeds (typically 30-90 words per minute), contributing to its eventual decline as OCR and text-to-speech technology improved.