I received a brochure from Iansyst who are demonstating the
Quicktionary Reading Pen at the UK Education Show 99, Thursday
to Saturday, at NEC in Birmingham (UK).  To quote from the brochure:

"Run it over a word that you have trouble reading, or that you don't
understand.  It reads it out to you aloud and shows you a full
dictionary definition of the word."

I saw this device in action at the BETTS show in January.  It seems
to be designed more for dyslexics than for people with low vision.

I have also seen a prototype pen device which stores the text that
you scan, and displays it on a tiny strip display. It was
designed for doing translations - e.g. English to German.  If it
had speech synthesis it would be much closer to what you need,
assuming you have enough vision to follow a line.

Cheers,

John
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In message <[log in to unmask]>
Tina via [log in to unmask] writes:

>    I am wondering if there is such a device as this:  a hand held
>device that would allow a person with low-vision to scan this device
>over print and it would then speak the print out loud as it is being
>scanned.  I know there are all kinds of screen readers and optical
>character recognition programs for scanners connected to computers.  I
>am looking for something that is hand held and does not have to be
>hooked up to a computer to read the text aloud.  I also know there are
>hand held devices you can hook up to a TV screen to display enlarged
>text.  I am looking for something that does not attach to anything, but
>can speak the text aloud.  I realize this may not exist, but thought I
>would give it a shot.  I attend the Closing the Gap conference every
>year and have not seen anything like it there but maybe I didn't look
>hard enough.  Please e-mail me at: [log in to unmask]

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Access the word, access the world       Tel/fax +44 181 742 3170/8715
John Nissen                             Email to [log in to unmask]
Cloudworld Ltd., Chiswick, London, UK   http://www.tommy.demon.co.uk