Intel (INTC) Innovation To Help Impaired Readers

Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg says that there have not been too many devices to help the blind read or to help people with language related learning abilities. Now Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) is trying to help with a new product called Intel Reader. This is a book sized device with a processor and a large screen to help with easy viewing while it has a downward facing camera to help text translation into audio or giant text.

The results have been mixed and while it has worked well with books and magazine articles, in other mediums it did a poor job. It also takes practice to use the camera properly. But this may not be a bother for people with disabilities who may find these difficulties to be quite tolerable given the benefits of the system. But the Reader is quite costly, costing as much as $1,500 and is available from a limited number of retailers that stock products for special-needs consumers. This Reader is a computer weighing just 1.4 pounds and has a 5 MP camera. It has the same Atom processor found in netbook computers and can hold 600 pages that you can transfer to and from PC or Mac.