James Nuttall Blog

When my sister worked at the Home Depot often a person would approach her with something to purchase and would say, "I left my glasses at home can you read this for me?" The reality was the person could not read. My sister would read the instructions on the item to the person. What the customer did not understand was that the smartphone in their pocket could take a picture of the instructions and read the instructions to them. 

Here are several apps that convert text in an image to spoken text. For iPhone the app is Voice Dream Scanner ($9.99) which can be downloaded from the App Store.. Open the app and point your camera at the text. After hitting the red shutter button, you just tap the read/play button and the text is displayed and read to you. Similarly for an Android phone download the Text Fairy OCR app from the Google Play Store (free). Open the app and point your camera at the text. You then push the shutter button. After selecting the OCR button, you then tap the Speaker Button to hear the text read aloud. I focus on these two apps since they are essentially going to shoot and read. For instantaneous reading there is the Envision AI app available both for iPhone and android. Simply open the app and point the camera at the text and it will be read aloud instantly. A similar free app for the iPhone is Microsoft’s Seeing AI app. Again open the app and point at the text which will be instantaneously read aloud.

You might be asking yourself, “Do I really need to read?” Thomas Corley helps to provide an answer. In his book Rich Habits he notes that 88% of self-made millionaires read for one half hour every day. This means they read between four or five books a month to learn something new to improve their lives. With assistive technology you too can join this group of successful readers. Therefore, reading can be within your reach and available as an everyday experience.

Technology brings you independence (when, where, what to read), joy of being a reader, education, entertainment, employment, integration into the larger community.

# posted by James Nuttall @ 11:32 PM