Blind can read:

After a big evolution in the world of innovation, a great deal of products are found to help special needs people. This blog will focus on one of these disabilities which is Blindness.

Braille is still the standard when it comes to helping the visually impaired read. Unfortunately translating text into braille is costly and time consuming thus the disproportionate number of braille books. Therefore, sung woo park, who is a Korean Designer, invented a new product called Voice Stick.Voice Stick is an advance optical character recognition scanner designed to make all books available to the visually impaired. As you pass the wand over a page, text in translated and read to you in a friendly voice. It can be used to convert any text from books, newspapers, contracts, mail, business cards, etc., into voice information.

Park says the idea came to him in a mildly ironic moment, when he was reading a magazine and found himself wondering how he would handle so simple a task as this reading if he were blind. Then he said “I wanted to incorporate scanning technology with voice-output technology.”

When asked what the hardest part of developing his Voice Stick design, Park says, “It’s very hard for someone with sight to understand fully the experience and needs of blind people. I covered my eyes for two days to try to get a sense for the challenges, and I did a lot of exercises in touching things and trying to understand the world that way. “This gave me a symbolic meeting point of factors in the work, too. Two senses are brought into play in the service of another.”