I was watching this 1977 footage of period inventions that were making it easier for blind and deaf people to navigate society when what comes on my screen but a demonstration of the Kurzweil Reading Machine-you know, the gadget that gave computers a voice. The whole video is interesting but Ray Kurzweil’s creation appears at the 3:40 mark.

From The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil recalls the creation of his reading machine:

In 1974, computer programs that could recognize printed letters, called optical character recognition (OCR), were capable of handling only one or two specialized type styles. I founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. that year to develop the first OCR program that could recognize any style of print, which we succeeded in doing later that year. So the question then became, ‘What is it good for?’ Like a lot of clever computer software, it was a solution in search of a problem.

I happened to sit next to a blind gentleman on a plane flight, and he explained to me that the only real handicap that he experienced was his inability to read ordinary printed material. It was clear that his visual disability imparted no real handicap in either communicating or traveling. So I had found the problem we were searching for – we could apply our ‘omni-font’ (any font) OCR technology to overcome this principal handicap of blindness. We didn’t have the ubiquitous scanners or text-to-speech synthesizers that we do today, so we had to create these technologies as well. By the end of 1975, we put together these three new technologies we had invented – omni-font OCR, CCD (Charge Coupled Device) flat-bed scanners, and text-to-speech synthesis to create the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. The Kurzweil Reading Machine (KRM) was able to read ordinary books, magazines, and other printed documents out loud so that a blind person could read anything he wanted.•