Researchers in the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group have built a prototype of a device that helps visually impaired people read printed text. The FingerReader, developed by graduate student Roy Shilkrot and professor Pattie Maes, among others, sits like a ring on a user’s finger and scans words via a built-in camera as the user points to them. Software identifies the words and translates them into an audio track. The FingerReader also alerts users if their finger veers away from a line of text.

Though the FingerReader isn’t on the market, the researchers say they’re looking into this option. As Maes recently told the Associated Press, the FingerReader is “a lot more flexible, a lot more immediate than any solution that they have right now.”

Explore Professor Maes’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.