Accessible Technology Options for the Blind and Visually Impaired Reader

Brian Charlson, Technology Director at the Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton, MA. demonstrates a variety of devices that provide the capability of accessing books via speech , large print, or braille. Among the devices that Brian demonstrates are: the Victor Reader Stream, the Booksense, The Bookport Plus, the Kindle, the iPad and the iPhone.

Chapters: 1 — Accessible Technology Options for the Blind and Visually Impaired Reader; 2 — Braille; 3 — Large print; 4 — Accessing books through speech; 5 — The Victor Reader Stream; 6 — The BookSense; 7 — The Bookport Plus; 8 — The Kindle; 9 — The iPad; 10 — The iPhone; 11 — Optical Character Recognition; 12 — Conclusion.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to the ever changing upgrades to technology there are some points made in this webcast that are no longer true: 1. The cost of the Refresh-a-braille is much less than it was at the time of this webcast filming and, 2. The Kindle digital book player has had two new iterations since this filming and Brian’s comment about “all Kindles” having the capacity to play books aloud is no longer true. Neither the Kindle Fire nor the newest Kindle have the speech feature that the original had.