Vista Center for the Blind
Tech Users Group
Meeting Notes
November 2014
Summarized by Gerry Boyadjieff
At the November 2014 Tech meeting at Vista Center, Peter Proscia from IRTI demoed 2 products. The 2 products were the Blaze EZ plus stand and his new top secret combo CCTV and OCR Book Scanner Reader.
The Blaze EZ is a portable easy to use OCR scanner that saves text in DAISY format. The Blaze EZ is also a portable player and radio. The Blaze EZ is about the size of a smart phone with large colorful buttons.
Peter also demoed the Blaze EZ Premium Option Pack which includes aplug-in remote and a fold up metal stand. The metal stand does a good job of holding the Blade EZ at the right distance from the reading material and the base of the metal stand provides a straight edge for lining up the reading material.
Blaze EZPremium Option Pack
The other product Peter demoed was his new top secret combo CCTV and OCR Book Scanner Reader. Peter originally demoed the prototype of this new product back in September, but it is still under development. So far Peter’s new product does not have a name. At one point Peter was considering calling it Excalibur, but found out that the name Excalibur is already being used by another low vision product. Any and all suggestions for a new name will be appreciated.
So what does Peter’s new product do? The new product looks very much like a standard CCTV with a monitor on a long arm above the X-Y table. Unlike a standard CCTV, Peter’s new product also has a built in book scanner that is capable of reading 2 pages of a book at a time. The technology for reading 2 pages at a time and dealing with the uneven levels of the pages dueto the binding is unique. Most scanners require that all the pages be flat which means thebinding must be cut off before scanning.
Another unique feature of Peter’s new product is the X-Y table. It is raised up high enough that a keyboard can be placed in front of the X-Y table. Most CCTV X-Y tables do not leave any room for a keyboard.
The best feature of Peter’s new product is a separate set of buttons for controlling all the operations of his product. The most basic version of Peter’s new product willnot need a keyboard and be very easy to operate. More advanced versions of Peter’s product will have full working computers for email and surfing the web.
Please feel free to submit any ideas to name this new product. For example, one suggestion made was “Oscar Megazoom”, the odd couple star that combines a Book Scanner and a Magnifier.
“OSCAR”
Optical
Scanner
Camera
And
Reader
The IRTI web site is andPeter Proscia’s email is