Stanford engineering professor and inventor John G. Linvill dies at 91
From: Stanford News - 03/10/2011
By: Andrew Myers

John Linvill, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford and
inventor of the Optacon reading device for the blind, has died. He was 91. 

Invented device to help the blind read 

Linvill reveled in his role of mentor. He was genuinely interested in the
success of others, especially entrepreneurial success. Linvill applied his
engineering creativity and his entrepreneurial spirit to help his daughter,
Candy, who became blind in infancy. Linvill sought a way to help her to
directly read printed materials without translation into Braille. His
solution, using integrated circuits developed in the labs and with the help
of colleagues at Stanford and Stanford Research Institute (SRI), was the
Optacon (Optical-to-Tactile Converter). The Optacon was a portable device
with a small, hand-held camera that could be moved across any type of printed
material to generate images on a fingertip-sized tactile display that were
then felt and interpreted by a blind reader. 

Linvill received a patent for the Optacon in 1966. He was a co-founder of
Telesensory Systems, Inc. (TSI) in 1970 a company established to manufacture
and disseminate the Optacon worldwide. The Optacon was to become one of the
most important examples of how technology could be applied to the development
of assistive devices for people with disabilities. In 1971, Industrial
Research, Inc. named the Optacon one of the 100 most significant products of
the year. Helped greatly by her father's invention, Candy attended Stanford
and went on to earn her doctorate in clinical psychology. 

He was recipient of the Louis Braille Prize (1984) from the Deutscher
Blindenverbande for the invention of the Optacon. 

Read the entire article at:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/march/john-linvill-obit-031011.html

Links:
Optacon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optacon
http://nfb.org/legacy/bm/bm98/bm980506.htm
http://www.deafblinduk.org.uk/optacon.html

Optacon documentation
http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_downloads/optacon.asp

The Telesensory Story
http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw060403