Soon people who are visually impaired could have a way to read that doesn’t involve brail. MIT has created an incredible new device called FingerReader that is essentially a scanner that you wear on your hand that’s capable of reading words on a page and then reciting them aloud back to you.
You can have the device read for you by holding it over a line of text and slowly scrolling it from left to right so it can scan each word. As you can see in the video posted below, the device is a little clunky from an end user’s perspective since you have to move it pretty slowly to get it to pick up all the words and the device’s robotic voice sounds very choppy. Nonetheless, this is an incredibly impressive innovation that only figures to get better as time goes by.
MIT says that the device “is a tool both for visually impaired people that require help with accessing printed text, as well as an aid for language translation” and it can read both words off paper and off an Amazon Kindle eReader.
Be sure to check out the full video showing off the FingerReader’s capabilities below.
