Kurzweil Reading Machine

A pioneering reading device for blind people invented by Ray Kurzweil in 1976, combining optical character recognition (OCR) with text-to-speech synthesis to read printed text aloud. The original device was as large as a stove and produced mechanical-sounding speech, but it demonstrated the feasibility of automated print-to-speech conversion. The technology evolved dramatically: by 2008, similar functionality fit on a cell phone (knfbReader), and today OCR-based reading is available as smartphone apps. The Kurzweil Reading Machine represents a landmark in accessibility technology history and illustrates how mainstream computing advances enable accessibility solutions to become smaller, cheaper, and more capable.