Smart cellphones to read bills, books for the blind

The U.S. National Federation of the Blind unveiled a new talking cellphone Monday that it said would be a "huge leap" in improving communications for the blind.

While reading scanners have long been on the market, the new Nokia cellphone is the first of its kind, said NFB spokesman Chris Danielsen at the product's launch in Washington, D.C. Consumers can use the phone to snap a photograph of a block of textthat is then translated into speech.

The NFB and Kurzweil Technologies, a developer of print-to-speech technology,are marketing the new device through their joint venture K-NFB Reading Technology Inc. The device is expected to sell for about $2,100 US starting in February.

"It is the next step, but this is a huge leap," James Gashel, vice-president of business development forthe new companytold the Associated Press.

"I'm talking to you on the device I also use to read things. I can put it in my pocket and at the touch of a button, in 20 seconds, be reading something I need to read in print."

The cellphone as a reading device offers unprecedented portability and immediacy, said Ray Kurzweil, CEO and co-founder of Kurzweil Technologies.

"This innovation has created opportunities disabled people had never considered before due to the large amounts of reading required in certain occupations," he said in a release.

"The first machine of this type was the size of a washing machine. As optical character recognition technology is integrated into smaller and smaller devices, access to print becomes available almost instantaneously."

More than 600,000 Canadians have sight problems that can't be corrected with ordinary lenses, according to Statistics Canada. This proportion is expected to increase significantly over the next decade as baby boomers age, said the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.

The developers of the software said future versions will enable consumers to translate text into other languages and identify faces and rooms.