"Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.?" Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

One of the main areas in which people who are blind or have a visual impairment suffer, particularly if they have lost their vision at a later age, is the loss of their ability to read. Suddenly being unable to read mail, books, magazines, restaurant menus and product labels, to name just a few areas, means a loss of independence and a subsequent decline in quality of life. Often people will turn to their family and friends for help; however having to rely on others is unsatisfactory to many people and the psychological burden further leads to a decline in quality of life. If a student experiences vision loss, being unable to access textbooks or see the whiteboard can put them at a disadvantage to their peers and lead to a loss of motivation in school and poor grades. Being able therefore to propose viable techniques that can enhance the ability of a person who is blind or visually impaired to read is very important, and thankfully there are many devices that can be utilized. 

Electronic magnification is a huge area and consists of devices from handheld to desktop and every size in between. Using an electronic magnifier or CCTV a user can read anything from a menu or food label to a book much more easily than with a regular magnifying glass.

If magnification doesn't work for you then OCR may be the answer. OCR or read aloud devices can take a picture of a piece of text and read it aloud to a user. Great for reading mail or books these devices can do wonders for your independence. 

As well as these there are many services available providing audio books. The Library of Congress runs a program called BARD offering free audio books and a device to play them to people with a visual impairment. You can apply at nlsbard.loc.gov or visit your local library. In addition, services such as Bookshare.org and learning ally offer access to many books including textbooks for students. As well as these, through a tablet, e-reader or phone it is possible to download thousands of books from places such as Amazon or the Apple App Store. 

Reading as a person who is blind or visually impaired is a huge topic and can't be covered in a blog post. For more information you can contact us at 312-997-3649, email at luke.scriven@chicagolighthouse.org and visit our Youtube Channel at youtube.com/chilighthouse 

The Orcam has been in pre-release in the USA for a few months and we have had the chance to try it out, and we are liking what we see. For those of you who haven't seen the promotional video (see it below) the Orcam is a wearable camera which attaches to the side of a pair of glasses and can perform OCR to read aloud whatever text the wearer is looking at. In addition the Orcam offers additional features such as facial recognition whereby, once you have stored a person in its memory, it will recognize that persons face when it sees them and tell you who you are looking at. It is also possible to store products into the Orcam's database so when you look at a products packaging it will tell you what the product is.

This technology can be extremely useful for the vision impaired or blind, and from our hands on we have seen that it works very well. The speed and accuracy of the OCR is exceptional, providing good quality speech output and being able to be triggered by the user simply pointing at what they want to be read. The speech is transmitted to the user via bone conduction so the audio is not spoken out loud to whoever is in the room with you!

Facial recognition is a feature that many will find useful to avoid embarrassing social faux pas, particularly useful for the blind or those with central vision loss, but does have limitations currently such as only being able to store 20 people in the memory, and having some problems if the person, for example, is wearing glasses but was not when they were initially stored in the memory. However there is a lot of potential for this idea and further updates will hopefully improve on some of these limitations.

The Orcam offers a new vision of how blindness and low vision technology can be integrated into your life through unobtrusive, wearable technology that assists with the things people most struggle with. Although not perfect, the Orcam offers a glimpse of the future of assistive technology and promises a new era where technology will seamlessly blend into a person's life and allow them full access to the world, whatever their disability.