MACHINERY AND TECHNOLOGY FOR 200 |
The OCR or Optical Character Recognition reader was invented by Raymond Kurzweil. Called the Kurzweil Reader, it was designed to scan and "read" text. However, the original model did not work well.
Xerox Corporation picked up the design and allowed Kurzweil to make improvements on his model. The system today is known as the Xerox/Kurzweil Personal Reader.
The present day system will scan a document, convert the photo of the text into recognized characters, convert the characters into words, and then store the words temporarily until they are converted into audio, large print type, or into braille.