Capturing a good read

In this, the age of the Amazon Kindle and the Sony E-Reader, Ian Macrae discovers that there's also an electronic reading solution for print-disabled people

For many people, nothing quite beats the pleasure of sitting down, curling up with, or sticking your nose in a good book. But also, in a world where, increasingly, information is delivered to us electronically, it’s surprising how much being able to read print on paper remains a necessity.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that this only presents barriers to people who can’t see. There are many physical and neurological reasons for all sorts of people finding that reading is not a straightforward option.

Enter the Intel Reader – at which point, you may be hearing in your head that annoying little four note jingle that plays whenever the name Intel is mentioned.

The first thing to say is that this is a seriously mainstream piece of kit. About the size of a book, or of other e-readers on the market, it looks and feels good. And that’s important. Too many manufacturers of specialist equipment seem happy to provide us with stuff which attracts the kind of curious stares usually reserved for people travelling with exotic or unusual pets.

But this is more than just a stylish accessory. Import electronic text to it from a computer and it will read it to you in a warm, very authentic sounding synthetic voice which is remarkably coherent and understandable even at the kind of high speeds which practised listeners can tolerate. You can also do the same with audio, and, in a forthcoming software upgrade, you’ll be able to vary the speed at which you listen to that too.

But what sets this reader apart is its ability to capture text. Using this facility enables you to read anything from your local delivery pizza menu to substantial documents or books.

The reader has a digital camera which you point at whatever you want to read.

One press of a button takes a picture and seconds later, the electronic voice is reading it to you.

With short documents, the processing speed really is very impressive. Where it runs into trouble is if you want to capture multiple pages, say, for instance, an entire book.

I found that, after about 120 pages, the image store was full and the processing speed was struggling to produce text quickly enough for me to start capturing pages again.

The Intel Reader’s portability is somewhat compromised by the “capture station” which it’s advisable to use if you are capturing a long document. While this
does give real stability and makes accurately positioning the text under the camera easy, it does require a good sized table-top space on which to rig it.

Having said that, it’s also possible to use the reader hand-held and on the fly to get remarkably accurate readings of things like letters, bills or that ever-handy pizza menu.