Ray Kurzweil

The reading machine. Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products in 1974 to build optical character recognition that could read any typeface, and in 1976 combined it with a flatbed scanner and speech synthesiser in the Kurzweil Reading Machine for blind readers. The National Federation of the Blind helped test and refine it. The first machines were the size of a washing machine and very expensive, but they proved print could be turned into speech.