The KNFB Reader IOS: Smart Phone App for Blinds

A new smartphone app that allows blind people to listen to an audio readback of printed text is receiving rave reviews and is being heralded as a life-changer by many people. Blind people say the KNFB Reader app will enable a new level of engagement in everyday life, from reading menus in restaurants to browsing handouts in the classroom. 

The $99 iOS app is the result of a four decades-long relationship between the National Federation of the Blind and Ray Kurzweil, a well-known artificial-intelligence scientist and senior Google employee. Kurzweil, who demonstrated the app on stage at the NFB's annual convention in June, said it can replace a "sighted adviser."

It’s known as the KNFB Reader app (an abbreviation of Kurzweil and National Federation of the Blind) and it is the fruit of forty years of research and development stretching back as far as 70’s. When Ray Kurzweil was not busy developing some the world’s first commercial electronic synthesizers, he was busy dreaming up ideas that help the blind overcome their condition. One such concept was the ‘Reading Machine’, an optical recognition system that at the time did not exist in any form. Early attempts where huge, cumbersome and extremely expensive, but through co-operation with the NFB in the US, and technological development with Belgium-based Sensotec NV, the KNFB Reader was born, harnessing the technology available and accessible to us all with our smartphone devices.

Taking advantage of new pattern recognition and image- processing technology as well as new smartphone hardware, the app allows users to adjust or tilt the camera, and reads printed materials out loud. People with refreshable Braille displays can now snap pictures of print documents and display them in Braille near-instantaneously, said NFB spokesman Chris Danielsen.

By harnessing the power of digital photography coupled with state of the art Apple hardware, this new app, tailored to the specific needs of people who are blind or visually impaired, makes access to print materials faster and more efficient than ever.

This fabulous, life-changing technology was presented by James Gashel, Vice President of Business Development at K–NFB Reading Technology Inc. and Secretary of the National Federation of the Blind, during the General Session of the Convention, before a presentation of Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google Inc. The KNFB Reader for iOS is a joint development effort of Sensotec nv and K–NFB Reading Technology Inc. K–NFB Reading Technology, Inc. is a joint venture between Kurzweil Technologies, headed by CEO Ray Kurzweil, a thirty-year innovator and pioneer in assistive technologies and the inventor of the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind; and the National Federation of the Blind, the largest, most influential membership organization of blind people in the United States.

The company's latest products, the Mobile Reader Product Line, which includes the knfbReader Mobile, designed for blind and low vision individuals, and the kReader Mobile, designed for use by sighted individuals with reading difficulties was launched in January of 2008. The kReader PC assistive reading and study skills software for struggling readers was launched in March of 2009. The products are distributed in the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, and the Pacific Rim. K–NFB Reading Technology, Inc. is a privately held company.