New Gadget Helps the Vision Impaired to Read Graphs From: Products Design & Development - 07/29/2014 People who are blind can now read more than just words, such as graphs and graphics, following the development of an affordable digital reading system by Curtin University (Western Australia) researchers. Opening up new career paths and educational opportunities for people with vision impairment, the system combines a number of pattern recognition technologies into a single platform and, for the first time, allows mathematics and graphical material to be extracted and described without sighted intervention. Senior Lecturer Dr Iain Murray and PhD student Azadeh Nazemi of Curtin’s Department of Electrical and Computing Engineering developed the device to handle the extraordinary number of complex issues faced by the vision impaired when needing to read graphics, graphs, bills, bank statements and more. The device works by using pattern recognition technology and other methods on any document to identify images, graphs, maths or text. From here it is then converted to audio format with navigation markup. Read the entire article at: http://www.pddnet.com/news/2014/07/new-gadget-helps-vision-impaired-read-graphs http://www.rdmag.com/news/2014/07/new-gadget-helps-vision-impaired-read-graphs http://www.wirelessdesignmag.com/news/2014/07/new-gadget-helps-vision-impaired-read-graphs http://news.curtin.edu.au/media-releases/new-gadget-helps-vision-impaired-read-graphs/ http://www.mdtmag.com/news/2014/08/new-gadget-helps-vision-impaired-read-graphs Links: Iain Murray http://ece.curtin.edu.au/people/index.cfm/I.Murray Graphic reader for the blind http://www.theaustralian.com.au/technology/graphic-reader-for-the-blind/story-e6frgakx-1227004850047