Back in December 2012, I wrote a blog post about some Autodesk employees using a Raspberry Pi computer to read to the blind. To this day, that blog posts get questions about how they did it. So I decided to write up a follow-up.
Here was the idea. With one camera and one speaker, a Raspberry Pi Computer can be used as an assistant to read a book to the blind. Usually the blind have to read Braille by touching their fingers to the page. This traditional approach requires that they obtain a special copy of each desired book instead of a standard one off the shelf. If they have this machine, the camera can take a photograph of a book’s page, the application installed in Pi computer can translate the photo to an article, and then the application can read the article aloud through a speaker. This new approach opens up a world of books to the blind that are not available in Braille.
Employee, Norman Hu, worked with his peers in Shanghai on completing the project. They created this…