Author: Tiffany Chan

By: Tiffany Chan, Victoria Murawski, and Jentery Sayers In our lab at the University of Victoria, we are currently remaking a reading optophone: an aid for the blind that converted text into sound during the twentieth century. Although the reading optophone never existed in a stable or fixed form, a common configuration involved operators placing books and other print materials on glass. They then used a handle to move a reading head located below the glass, sliding it back and forth to scan pages. As pages were scanned, the machine would express type as a series of audible tones. To…