peter responds requesting me to post: Hi Brent and all, You say > My friend uses kurzweil and I do too, but he > has a camera attached, and kurzweil allows > selection of that as scanner source, how on > earth do you use a camera like a scanner, to > read anything? The Kurzweil software only deals with text, while The vOICe "reads" any image content in "raw" form, hence indiscriminate of the visual content. It does so by scanning each image from left to right while associating height with pitch and brightness with loudness. Therefore it is far more general than what Ray Kurzweil recently described in his article in the July 1 issue of eSchool News, saying > For blind people, we actually will have reading machines > within a few years that are not just sitting on a desk, > but are tiny devices you put in your pocket. You'll take > pictures of signs on the wall, handouts at meetings, and > so on. We all encounter text everywhere, on the back of > packages, on menus. By 2010, these devices will be very > tiny. You will be able to wear one on your lapel and > scan in all directions. These devices probably will be > used by the sighted as well, because they will allow us > to get visual information from all around us. The vOICe "reads" arbitrary visual shapes and patterns, including for instance line graphs, to make for a relatively easy starting point. In many other cases, the resulting sounds can be excruciatingly complex and hard to interpret. The vOICe does not attempt to interpret the camera view in any way. That part is left to the user (or to optional add-ons for OCR and shape recognition, like those for use with The vOICe Learning Edition). Of course this kind of general but hard-to-master technology will not be appreciated by everyone, as was confirmed by some of the recent reply postings on this list. Best regards, Peter Meijer Seeing with Sound - The vOICe http://www.seeingwithsound.com Source URL of full eSchool article (free registration needed): http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=4491 _______________________________________________ Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list