Ray Kurzweil is going to make big money from the blind—up to $3,500 a pop for his ‘K-NFB,’ a device that scans printed text and repeats it audibly.
“This has probably taken something like three years’ effort by some fairly diligent scientists,” explained Mervin Robertson, managing director of Sight & Sound Technology, who will be selling the device in the UK.
“Effectively, it’s a software cost that makes up the vast majority of this.”
Short for the modestly-named ‘Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader,’ the K-NFB was developed with the help of a $2 million grant from the federation that shares its name. We can only presume the two million bucks were used to pay for the sort of “fairly diligent” work one can expect from those who have dedicated their ten-to-four workday to bettering the lives of the disabled by selling them a glorified PDA.
Reading ‘to go’ for blind people [BBC via /.]
